- Welcome back you beautiful people, today I'm going to bring it
down a level all the way down to the basic skills that you need to know on how to ride a mountain
bike or any bicycle out there. Now you can learn these tricks
anywhere on the flat ground. Now I'm going to strip it
down to the bare bones, but I'm out here in the
woods, in the Surrey Hills on a beautiful sunny day. I want to move here. Let's get started on the first one. All right this first round
I'm going to show you, is just basically stood up when your bike. It's quite intimidating being stood up on your bike because you
probably find yourself, your body weight is too far forward and you're on your toes or
you're leaning too back, which is all your body
weight on your rear wheel. You want to keep your body weight
quite central to your bike. You want to have your
knees bent and elbows bent and you'll be looking ahead as well and get used to just moving
back and forward on your bike just so you can find a perfect limitations and balance on your bike out there. Little recap on out the saddle movement. Super important to be comfortable
standing up on your bike. Make sure you keep your
knees bent and elbows bent. Get comfortable moving
forward and back in front and behind your saddle, over your bars. Get to know your balance on your bike. (epic music) Whilst we're here and we
are all about standing up, on our bike, I'm going to to
talk about using your body as suspension on your bike. Now, a lot of people just rely
on a full suspension bike, but the most important thing is is you've got to use your
body as well as suspension, not just your bike. You want to get used to using
your body as suspension, so the best thing is it
stand up on your bike again, after finding your movement, finding your balance on your bike while stood up ride along
and just bounce around on your bike, bend your
elbows, bend your knees. You just feel like
you're going down a trail that's quite rough with
a little bit of a drop, a little bit of a descent. Just bend your knees, just over exaggerate using your body as suspension. Okay this is a perfect
example for using your body as a suspension, not
just your mountain bike. When you're going down the trail, this little drop right
here, you want to drop off and let you body work as well, but you want to bend your knees and bend your elbows when landing, just to absorb that impact a lot more and keep you a little bit
more smoothly on the trail is because when it gets
a little bit bigger, if you don't use your body as suspension and just your bike, it's
going to be a rough landing and it's going to be harsh on your bike. (epic music) You might as often, avoid the front brake, but it's not your enemy. Get used to using both brakes. Now when you get to
using this front brake, just be riding along on the flat ground. Make sure you body weight's quite central and when you press it,
just lean back a bit. You don't want to give it a jolt because it's going to give
you that horrible feeling of going over the bars. You want to feather that break, you want to use it with ease, don't grab a handful of brake cause it is going to shift
your body weight forward and feel like you're going
to get thrown over the bar. So when you're doing it, when you brake, you just lean back a little
bit, straighten up your arms and just look forward but lean back. And also when you're doing front braking and you're turning, you
don't want to do that because it's got a tendency
to stop you or to break grip, to break loose on the ground
and tend to slide away and have a front wheel wash up. So keep it straight, get used to braking with that front brake because it does help when you're out on the trail. Skidding is not just for kids. All of us love to do it out there, it's super Fun and it just feels amazing locking up that back wheel and losing grip and getting sideways. Now it's all well and
good, but it's all good. You want to learn how to use that brake in a situation where
you don't want to skid. So it's all about running
along, feathering that break and modulating that breaking
so you don't lose grip when you're out on the trail. The tracks stand. Now this can show you how
to use slow speed control on the trail and it teaches
you how to use small movements on your bike effectively. And that is with steering,
pedalling and braking. You want to stand up, weight
central with a touch forward, turn your bars, a bit, 45 degrees, whatever feels right with you and if you're struggling with
then lean your front wheel against the ledge or a
curb just to help you get that balancing points
so you can understand where you are on your bike. You're in a car park just
before going for a ride, or if you're feeling too
energetic to get off your bike, to get back in your car, to go home. This is a perfect place to
start learning this basic skill and that is riding along with
your hands off your bike. Now this will help you steer you, bike, sat on your saddle with your saddle and with your legs and this is super fun. It's challenging as well, especially when the car
parks not very flat. So, just take hands off slowly like this, keep them above the bars so
you can get back to them quick if you are right at the beginning
of learning the no hander. Now the perfect point where
I found was sat straight up on your saddle and you
feel like your body weight is quite far back, but you'll
find that the balancing point is right there on that
point of uneasiness. Now the best thing about it
is you can use your saddle and your legs and your hips
to move your bike around without even turning your handlebars with your hands on your bike. You just want to find the perfect balance between body central on your
bike and you're going along. Now you can experiment and you can fly like a bird (mumbles) and just show off and set a challenge to see
how far you can actually go. (epic music) Okay, slow speed cornering. Now I'm going to combine
all of these techniques that I've showed you throughout this video into this one section that's
going to help you out, especially when you're out on the trail. You're not going to be going
that fast as a beginner. So you want to know how
to do slow speed cornering and I didn't set up the being here, but I'm going to use this
area to use those techniques on slow speed corners. So I'm going to bring in the tracks done, I'm going to bring in the braking, I'm going to bring in that body movement and I'm going to bring in a
dog as well to help me this. This is going to help
spice up the whole thing. (epic music) Right, this next step now
is leaning the bike over. So depending on what size
you want to lean it over, you drop your outside foot. Look I'm dropping my outside foot and I'm leaning the bike
over trying to keep my body quite central still to the bike, keeping it stood upright. As well try it both sides,
lean it over, bend your knees, bend your elbows, just
lean your bike over, get used to doing this
because this will help you on the trail, especially when the trail gets a bit off camber. Also, it can help you in turns as well. I'm going to draw a line
in the dirt, like this. You can make it as long as you want, but try and make it as
straight as possible and what we're going to do is
we're going to work on balance cause that's key when it comes
to riding a mountain bike or any bicycle as such. No matter what size wheels you have, balance is key when
you're out on your bike. (epic music) All right, this next
technique is pretty key when you're out there, probably
in an urban environment, but it's going to help you
out in the woods as well when you're on your bike and
that's getting that front wheel off the ground, especially
in the urban environment, you can lift that front wheel and you can just get
it up on top of a curb and then bump your back wheel up. As well as if there's
an obstacle in the trail you can lift your front wheel
up to get off of over it and let your back, we'll bump over it. Now, let me explain how to do that. Bend your knees, but
bend your elbows as well so you body weight's over the front and then explode back. Like that, just to lift
up your front wheel, you're not using your
arms to bring up the bike. You're using the body
weight, pushing backwards and letting your arms extend out and jolt and bring up your front wheel. Now keep practicing that technique and you'll get that front
wheel up in the air. Just to make sure if you do pull too hard, you find yourself about to loop out. So just cover that rear brake. (epic music) So this next technique is now
we want to get that rear wheel off the ground to never
get over an obstacle that you've lifted your front wheel over. Now, the best way to do this
is you want to preload this, and what I mean by preload
is you want to lean back, get your body weight over
the back of the bike, heels down, knees bent,
and then when you do it, you want to explode upwards, but not bending your knees and putting all your
weight onto the front. You want to curl your feet on your pedals to bring up that rear wheel. The best way to do this
is with flat pedals First. You don't want to rely
on this clipped pedals even though it's easier, but you don't want to
get into that bad habit. And then you have a 10
basic skills for beginners to learn out there, you
can do them in a car park. Now, if you are a beginner
and this is your first time on the channel, then you
missing out some great content. Don't forget to hit
that globe to subscribe cause you are missing out. And if you want to see a really
good video on basic skills that myself and Leigh Donovan, a professional mountain
biker did click just up here. Don't forget to give us a thumbs up like, and I'll see you at the next one. See yah!
