- Welcome back to Berm Peak. I'm Seth.
And today we're gonna be doing something
a little bit different, kind of the same.
We're gonna be talking about some of my favorite bike skills
that you don't really need to know.
So we're not gonna be talking about manuals
and bunny hops and things like that.
That's kind of stuff you need to know for certain trails.
This is stuff you would rarely ever need, but it's fun,
and it's nice to know.
And so we're gonna start
with some stuff right here in the driveway.
(upbeat music)
So the very first one, doing right now, standing in place,
a lot of people call it track standing.
It's not really track standing.
Track standing is like on a fixed gear bike, but yeah,
you can stand in place on almost any bike
with a little bit of practice.
Now, turning your wheel makes it a little bit easier.
Gives you kind of a balance point.
Sometimes squeezing your brakes makes it easier,
but it's mostly practice.
On a trail you might have to do this
because the person in front of you
just kind of slipped up on the climb
and you wanna be able to stop
and wait for them to get out of the way
and then charge ahead.
Believe it or not, it's easier to do
on a slight incline or even a steep incline.
You just put your foot down on one of the crank arms,
push forwards, and let the bike kind of rock back and forth,
and that's gonna make it easier for you to balance.
If you can hop, it uses a lot of energy.
It's not really track standing,
but you can stabilize yourself
and get yourself back into position if you hop a little bit.
But that's it. It's practice. Track stand.
(gentle music)
So I've showed in other videos when doing BMX
and dirt jumper stuff that you can ride backwards,
but usually it's on a down slope or you come up a ramp
and then you come back down backwards.
I wanna show you what I call self-powered reverse.
So let's say I wanna ride into the garage,
but oh, I rode up too far.
I can't go into the garage now.
I'm just gonna back up and go into the garage.
So there's a really good reason
I went over track standing first,
is you should really have that dialed
before you try self-powered reverse.
Now, like I said, the title of this video is, like,
Bike Skills You Don't Really Need to Know,
not a lot of scenarios
where that's gonna be really important,
however, I'm gonna show you how to do it.
You're gonna start with your finger on the brake.
You're gonna rock your entire body back
and create some momentum.
Then you're gonna release the brake
and the bike's gonna follow.
Now, once you get going,
your pedals are gonna try and kick backwards.
When you push a bike backwards, pedals go backwards.
So you have to consciously be spinning backwards as well,
which you probably noticed me doing.
Now the rest is practice.
The first time you do this, you're gonna get like six inches
and you're gonna fall over.
Next time you'll get like a foot.
And if you actually stick to it and keep trying it,
you can just keep going backwards.
Now, once you are done going backwards,
there's stylish ways you can kind of come out of it,
but you could also just squeeze the brakes
and just push forwards again, start riding away.
Pretty simple.
So one thing you can do while you're out riding
is keep the trail clear.
If there's a little piece of debris on the trail,
you can push it aside off the trail.
You can actually do it without getting off your bike.
You can flick it aside with your front wheel
and gonna show you how.
(upbeat music)
Pretty easy. You just gotta steer really quickly.
You're just gonna flick the handlebar
and try and catch it with the back side of the wheel.
(upbeat music)
So you're coming up on this side, the debris is here.
When you turn, your wheel does that.
So it goes, boo, knocks it off the trail.
Show you again.
(Seth laughs)
So the next skill is nose bonking.
Nose bonking is kind of like a trick, I guess,
but there are practical reasons
why you might wanna learn how to do it.
For instance, let's say you're riding with some friends
and you wanna impress them. Nose bonk.
(playful music)
So this log is kind of right in the middle of the ride path.
So you either have to bump over it or bunny hop over it.
Perfect thing to nose bonk.
Nose bonking is exactly what it sounds like.
It's taking a nose of your bike, the front wheel,
and bonking it while you're up in the air.
So instead of jumping straight over it, you're jumping,
pushing your nose down onto the log and then continuing on.
Now, it is sorta high consequence.
If you nose bonk too early, you're going over the handlebar.
And if your friends are behind you,
they're gonna run you over.
But if you do it successfully, it looks pretty cool.
I would say the best nose bonks happen
when you're sort of at the apex of your trajectory.
So don't do it on the way up.
Don't do it on the way down.
Do it when you're kind of floating in mid-air,
that's gonna be when it looks the best,
it's the slowest, and it has the most style.
But best way to learn it
is to just mess around and practice.
And so the smaller the obstacle you can find,
probably the better.
So just put like a stick in the middle of a trail,
bunny hop over it and try and tap it with your front wheel.
If there's not many ways to get hurt doing that
because you can just roll over it.
Something a little bigger like this, you do too early,
you're going over the bars.
Nose bunk looks cool.
So the next one, it's mainly good to do
on a hill or something.
Pivoting on your rear wheel in order to turn around.
Not many practical reasons to do it.
I guess it does have a tighter turning radius
than actually riding and turning.
I'll show you how to do it.
You tell me if it's practical.
Now, get to where you wanna pivot around
on your back wheel and preload.
So you're gonna push your suspension down
'cause you're gonna pull up,
yank up into whatever direction you wanna go,
and you have to look, not just your head,
it's gotta be your eyes too.
If you don't look with your eyes, it's not gonna work.
And what you're gonna find is,
that is the most difficult part.
You have to overcome that.
And all of a sudden, it's gonna work
in the snap of a finger.
Now, one thing that helps you whip around a little quicker
is pushing down in your crank arm,
giving it a little bit of juice.
You don't have to,
but honestly, I think it's harder without it.
There's not a whole lot of mountain bike trails
where you have to go over here
and then turn around immediately,
unless it's an out and back.
So you can do it once per ride on an mountain back.
Get to the top, swing around,
and come back in the other direction.
Looks kind of cool. Fun to do.
So we've all heard of bunny hopping.
That's when you pull up the front of the bike
and then shift your weight forwards.
The whole bike is up off the ground,
and you can jump over something.
Very practical skill, but there's another way to hop.
It's doing the exact opposite and it's called a nollie.
So the term nollie comes from skateboarding.
It's the opposite of an ollie 'cause it's a nose ollie.
On a bike, I guess, we would call it a nunny hop.
So we just use the word nollie.
Basically, you lift your back wheel up first
and then you lift up your front wheel.
Now the reason that this isn't very practical
is that you're lifting up your back wheel
as you're approaching an obstacle.
You're gonna just ride into it
before your wheels off the ground.
Always make sense to lift up the front first.
So it's something you would do as sort of a trick
or to throw some style into something.
Now, first you gotta learn how to lift up your back wheel.
And it's actually very easy.
You just grip your bars and just throw your weight forwards.
Feels a little unnatural,
feels like you're gonna go over the handle bars,
but if you keep practicing at it, not that hard.
Now, I'm not clipped in.
I have flat pedals and I'm able to do it.
Seems like you would have to pull up on the pedals, but no.
You gotta push forwards on the handle bars.
Just grip 'em real tight and try.
Now, once you've gotten kind of adept at lifting
the back wheel up off the ground,
you gotta wait till you're sort of at the highest point
and try and jump your body up,
then just let it float and land back down on the ground.
Now when Kyle Warner came to visit and rode all this stuff,
he nollied off the drama drop.
And I wanna show you why that is so incredible
and so dangerous.
So if you were to just unweight your front wheel
and ride off this drop,
you would just kinda lift up over here and ride off of it.
Now, if you were to bunny hop off the drop,
you would lift up your front wheel
and then you would lift up your back wheel
and now you've cleared the drop.
Now, what Kyle did, he lifted up his back wheel first.
So if he doesn't clear the drop before his nollie is over,
his rear wheel is gonna catch here
and he's gonna go over the handlebars.
And so you could barely tell what he was doing,
but it's unbelievably scary.
(dramatic music)
So I showed you how to pivot on your rear wheel.
This is kind of the same,
but on your front wheel and moving your back wheel around.
And this is actually really practical.
Sometimes you're on the right ride path,
your front wheel is exactly where you want it to be,
but your back wheel
is about to not be where you want it to be.
And so you wanna shift it over.
So we learn the nollie.
You know how to lift up your back wheel.
And so you can use sort of the same skill
to shift your back wheel around.
And I'm gonna show you a situation
where you might wanna do it.
So suppose I'm riding down this way
and now I wanna make this turn.
So my front wheel is lined up exactly
how I want it on the bridge,
but my back wheel is behind this stump over here
'cause I went too far inside.
I should have gone wider.
I can now pop my back wheel over here
and line up for this feature that I'm about to ride.
Let me show you how it works.
(upbeat music)
So though you can push on your handlebar to lift your wheel,
just like the nollie, if you have some forward momentum,
you can kind of squeeze your front break a little bit.
Just make sure you don't squeeze it so hard
that you go over the handlebars.
Now some people call that an endo turn.
I don't really like to call it a turn
because you're mainly just shifting your rear wheel over.
Now when you can use it as a turn,
is to get around a really tight switchback, let's say.
You can get your front wheel where you want it to be
and swing your rear around.
Otherwise, I just think it's a really good way
to get your back wheel lined up
to where your front wheel is.
(gentle music)
So I just took the chain off my bike
'cause the next thing I'm gonna show you
is how to propel your bike without pedaling.
You can actually pump it, and I'm gonna show you.
(upbeat music)
That's all pump and power.
The way I'm doing that is I'm steering one way,
whipping the bike in one direction, steering the other way,
and whipping the bike in the other direction,
and I'm using the pressure of kind of side loading the tire
to push off each time.
You can actually do the same thing on a skateboard.
You can go for miles and miles without pushing it all.
You can do the same thing on a bike.
And when I used to ride BMX and I would lose a chain,
I'd go for miles and miles like that.
And as long as there aren't any steep uphills,
you can pretty much go indefinitely.
That's a really easy one to learn,
way easier with your fork locked out.
And, of course, you don't need to remove your chain.
I just wanted to prove
that I was really propelling the bike forwards.
So there you have it.
Some mountain bike skills that you don't really need,
but they're fun,
and that's kind of what mountain biking is all about anyway.
So I hope you learn something today.
And if not, I hope you at least found this entertaining.
Thanks for riding with me today,
and I'll see you next time.
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