- Today, we're looking at pumping,
which when mastered takes riders from being pretty good
to really flippin' good.
Okay.
(upbeat music)
If you've ever been riding with someone
and they easily pull away
without any obvious reason why,
even though you're giving it everything,
peddling your little heart out,
I bet 50 pence that they are pumping better
than a box-fresh track pump.
It's the secret to creating speed and grip
so it's definitely something you should practice and master.
Let's begin.
In a previous video, we talked about
a very similar technique called absorbing.
This act of manipulating the bike through the terrain
to keep the upper body separated
from all the gnarly chunk in the trail
allows you to increase speeds without getting bucked around.
The absorbing of these trail-induced forces
grants control to the rider,
but we're going to flip the switch
and start putting energy back into the trail
to reap the benefits.
Pumping as a skill doesn't generally get people
in trouble when they get it wrong,
but it can put you into compromising body positions
if done incorrectly.
Pump tracks are obviously
the perfect representation of this skill,
as proficient riders can generate insane amounts of speed,
purely through some well-timed weight shifts
and energetic limb extensions.
It doesn't end there though,
as this technique of putting energy
down through the bike and into the ground
creates spikes in pressure between the tires and the ground,
which can be utilized for extra grip
when cornering or braking.
Also, the timing and movements for pumping
can be adapted and utilized for other techniques,
such as bunny hopping, jumping, and manualing.
This is such a versatile skill
that unlocks so many possibilities in your riding.
Let's start with absolute basics of the skills
so you understand exactly what's going on.
Pumping is the act of pushing the bike down into the ground
at very specific points on the trail.
This is done by straightening your arms and legs.
The faster you do this, the harder you pump the bike.
This happens because the heaviest part of your body,
the torso and head, are being pushed up
and away from the bike.
And according to Newton's Third Law of Motion,
an equal and opposite force will be exerted
down through the bike, into the ground.
Except the suspension and tires
will steal a little bit of that energy
before it gets to the ground.
That's why firmer suspension and tires
are faster on pump tracks.
If you push really hard and fast,
it launches your body up a lot.
This seems like a perfect recipe
for yeeting yourself off your bike at high speed.
(zipping)
This is hilarious and kind of true,
but it's happening because I'm trying to demonstrate this
on flat ground while stationary,
and also because the technique is not complete yet.
More often than not with this technique,
you don't want to just pump the bike from a rigid position
like I just demonstrated.
You actually want to build
some downward momentum with your torso
before straightening those arms and legs.
It's then the act of stopping, reversing,
and returning your upper body back to its original position
that causes a huge transfer of energy down through the bike,
without the aforementioned yeeting of oneself into orbit.
The faster you drop and reverse the movement,
the bigger the energy spike in the pump.
You've probably seen others doing this
when testing their suspension.
So, those sharp few watching will have figured out
that the absorbing technique centered around separating
the mass of the upper body from the forces in the trail,
whereas the pumping technique
is using the mass of the upper body
to put energy back into the trail.
The key thing to get right with pumping for speed is timing.
The common consensus is that you should pump the bike down
the backside of features, and while overly-simplified,
it kind of works most of the time.
It's not quite as simple as that and we can do better.
Let's do better.
Take, for example, a large down slope
with a transition to level ground at the bottom.
Taking the general rule of pumping the backside...
Don't, don't laugh.
We're better than this.
Don't laugh. (camera man chuckles)
Taking the general rule of pumping the backsides,
there are many ways to interpret this.
Do you smoothly straighten the arms and legs
down the entirety of the slope
to reach full extension as you hit the bottom?
That doesn't seem to generate much in the way of speed
and you end up in a really compromising position
for the compression at the bottom.
Do you give a sharp pump at a random point on the slope?
This does give a slight momentary increase
to the speed of the bike,
as you are pushing it away from you, down the slope,
but then the speed burst ends once you finish pumping
and you then also end up in a terrible position
for the compression at the bottom.
So, here's the secret.
You don't pump the backside.
Well, you pump the transition.
(birds twittering)
Yup?
Are we done?
Transitions are the changes in angle of the trail
and come in two variants:
convex shaped crests and concave shaped bowls,
but it's the concave bowl transitions we are interested in,
specifically the ones that transition
from a downward angle towards horizontal.
If you push a wheel down into one of these transitions,
you can see its downward vertical momentum
gets smoothly converted into horizontal momentum.
That's free speed, baby!
Amazing, we've cracked it!
It's so obvious.
You just do that pumping action with the arms and the legs
like what I did at the start.
Er, hmm, no, not quite.
The basic principles of the technique still apply,
but we've got to mix it together
with the absorbing technique from one of our prior videos,
otherwise we get all out of shape.
Take this roller, for example.
Using the absorbing technique
from one of our previous videos,
you would stand tall to prepare for the feature,
a low the bike to come up into you over the peak,
guide the bike back down the dip,
and then settle back into a central boss stance
or tackle the next feature.
Notice the upper body stays quite level
and controlled through this,
and there's no spikes in acceleration.
Now, let's say we want to generate some speed by pumping.
Things start pretty similarly
by absorbing the up slope of the first roller
and the arms guide the front wheel down into the dip,
then bam, the legs explosively straighten,
driving the back wheel through that transition,
generating forward momentum.
You can add to this, as well, by unweighting over the crest
to generate a little bit more downward force,
or even you could pre-hop before the feature again,
to maximize the energy you can put down
into that transition.
Feel free to get creative with it.
See how much speed you can generate.
The biggest mistake I see people making
in this type of feature
is putting way too much emphasis on the arms.
Arms aren't as strong as legs,
and we know from the body positioning back in episode two,
that there's not actually much weight going through them
when using proper body positioning.
This means your arms
can't actually generate that much speed,
and it's just a waste of energy to try.
The arms still have to guide the bike through the feature,
like in the absorbing technique,
but it's the legs pushing through the back wheel,
into that transition that makes the magic happen.
A lot of riders accidentally give it
a little too much juice with the arms
and end up with their weight
back in passenger mode for a moment.
When you pump with the legs,
the arms should actually bend at the same moment
so you settle back into a central boss stance.
To practice this technique,
I like to ride some of my favorite mellower flowy trails
with minimal peddling.
This incentivizes you to pump
every single little transition you can find
and it's also a great way to practice the technique.
You'll find yourself trying to generate speed
off the tiniest little bits and steps,
which really helps with your timing.
I mentioned something about cornering earlier, didn't I?
I did?
Yeah, I did.
He's nodding, yeah.
Let's dip into this one real quick
so you've got the full picture.
Just let it be known that we're going to tackle
cornering specifically in detail in a future vid,
so this will just be a sample.
We should remember from the body positioning video
that the tires grip with the help of the weight
of the rider passing down into the tires.
The more weight, in theory, the more grip you should have.
Big boys and girls out there
might get real excited about that prospect,
but the more weight you have,
the more force is required to change direction,
so that kind of cancels out the extra grip benefits.
Sad face, mm.
Aww.
Settle down!
Pumping to the rescue.
With a nice bit of technique,
we can briefly increase the weight
going down into the tires,
increasing grip just where it's required,
and on some turns, even increase your speed.
Let's start with some basic flat turns first.
Now, remember I demonstrated the pumping technique
at the start, going straight up and down?
That is great for testing suspension,
but you don't actually do it like that on the trails.
This is because the front wheel will always hit the feature
or initiate the turn before the back wheel.
This means the pumping action actually has to happen
as a wave, moving from the front to the back.
To do this, you add an ever-so-slight shift of body weight
from front to back as you pump the bike.
The other way of thinking about it
is you push the bike slightly forwards
as you pump down through the bike.
It's very similar to doing a front wheel lift.
You pump the bike forward to lift the front wheel
and then immediately get the weight
over the front to bring it back down.
This action pumps the front wheel through the turn,
and then the back wheel,
and settles you back into the center of the bike.
On flat turns, you aim to do this
either at the sharpest point of the turn,
or the apex, is another way of putting it,
or if it's a long flat turn, you do it at the end
to punctuate the end of the turn
and snap you back up perpendicular with the ground.
Make sure, as you pump through the legs
at the exit of the turn,
you settle back into a centered position
ready for what's next.
Now, if we were to take this to a turn with some support,
we just tweak it a little bit to make it work.
If you were to take a compression and tip it on its side,
what you have is a berm.
So, the technique for pumping a berm
is almost identical to pumping a compression,
but just a bit of an angle.
If you were to ride at a compression and stay rigid,
you'd find a huge amount of force going through your hands
as you hit the compression,
potentially causing you to crumple.
The same thing happens with a sharp berm.
This means that for a tight berm,
you actually have to shift your weight back
in anticipation of the compression in the hands
as you hit the corner.
As the front wheel hits the apex
of the tightest bit of the turn,
you then engage the pump through your legs
which drives the back wheel through the turn
and gets you back into a center position
for the exit of the turn
while giving you a boost in exit speed.
The sharper the turn,
the faster you have to pump through the legs.
The mellower the turn, the less you do.
If there's no obvious sharpest point of the turn,
you do it at the end and snap yourself back straight,
like with the flatter turns.
Like all the other techniques,
make sure you use the pump through the legs
to drive your weight back into a center position
so you're back in charge for whatever is next.
Let's take a look at the techniques on a couple of features
and make sure you've got all the key points
clear in your head.
So this bit of track here is perfect for practicing
pumping the bike through those bold transitions
'cause there's two of them
and it's actually really tricky to get the timing right.
So, let's have a look at this.
First bold transition is in this corner,
just at the end of the corner, here.
So, you come around the turn, nice bold transition.
so in this one, you would really want to be focusing on that
pumping through the legs.
But. immediately after we've got a crest here.
So for this, you're gonna have to use
the absorbing technique,
which we talked about in another video,
but it's got to happen so quickly
that when you actually pump the bike into this turn,
you don't actually want to give it too much energy,
otherwise you'll end up taking off
and landing in an up-slope.
You don't want to do that.
So for this one, you would soak up the crest,
guide the bike down it,
but keep the legs coiled up,
keep them ready, and then drive the back wheel
through the transition at the bottom.
It's pumping the back wheel through those transitions,
that was the key thing.
Slow it down, work in the technique,
and build the speed up.
This corner isn't one
that we'd really be trying to gain speed out of.
The pumping technique is more to help the bike grip
and follow the corner properly.
So coming into this,
it's got quite a flat long steep entrance,
nice support at the start,
and then it really tightens up quite near the end of it.
Find that is pretty common on the steeper types of turn,
that they kind of like go down with the gradient
and then the scoop is at the end.
So, coming into this, you're definitely gonna have
your weight back 'cause it steeper and you're braking.
And when you're braking,
do have to shift the weight back a bit.
So coming down into this corner,
where are you gonna pump?
It's the transition.
So if you were to take this corner,
flip it up on itself
and think about the steep running
and where it starts to level out,
that's down there.
So what's gonna happen
is as you come down here,
track's steeper, doing a bit of braking,
weights back a little bit.
You get to this transition,
you've then got to pump.
You've gotta drive through the legs
to drive the bike out to the turn,
get your weight back to center
at the tightest part of the turn,
the apex of the turn, the transition of the turn.
And that is right here.
Handy trick for knowing where that is,
is if you ride a corner,
the point in the turn where you feel the most G-forces
or the most struggle with like, trying to do the turn,
that's usually the place
that you want to initiate this pump through the legs.
For this pumping technique,
the main thing you want to remember in terms of timing
is when the front wheel hits the transition,
that is when you should be starting
to pump through the legs; that's your indicator.
As soon as you feel the force
of the transition in the hands,
push through the legs.
So right here, hit the corner,
front wheel hits that transition,
push through the legs,
and that drives the bike out to the corner,
weight centered, and off we go.
That's the theory, anyway.
Those are the key things you want to do
when you're practicing this, like the other one.
Do things slower than you would normally do it,
make it easier so you can concentrate on the technique,
nail it, and then you add the speed back in.
Man, that is pumping.
Now it's all up to you.
Head out there, unleash your pumping skills
on some unsuspecting transitions,
experiment, get it wrong, look like an idiot,
Learn from your mistakes, master this skill,
subscribe to the channel
and I'll see you in the next video.
Maybe.
I mean, YouTube algorithm, it's a bit messed up.
Gets the order all wrong.
So maybe, maybe the next one.
Is that it, Glenn?
- That's it!
- Is that it? - That's it!
- You've done it! - We've only gone and done it.
- What's the time?
Is it like one o'clock?
(chuckles)
- It's lunch time!
(all laugh)
Woo!