Better Wheelies In 1 Day - How To Wheelie

hey what's up guys my name is Kyle Warner and today I'm going to show you guys how to wheelie so wheelies are one of those things where some people can do them effortlessly it's no big deal and then other people it takes years and years of practice to figure it out over the years I've learned a bunch of really small tips that make a huge difference and how easy it is to wheelie and it'll kind of help you stay in that position better so today we're gonna go over that I'm gonna coach my girlfriend on how to wheelie and today I'm gonna help you guys figure out how to do it! Alright so this is my girlfriend April and today she's gonna learn how to wheelie, there's some mistakes I see a lot of people make right off the bat. so first let's go over those mistakes, the first mistake that I see people make is either they're in too hard of a gear or too easy of a gear and basically if you're in too hard of a gear you can't get enough torque to get the front wheel to come up, if you're in too easy of a gear you can maybe get the wheel up but then you spin out really fast and the front wheel drops. one other thing people do is when they are in a wheelie or when they're trying to lift for a wheelie they put their head down and look at the front tire. again like we talked about the manual video that drops your weight forward and it'll make your front wheel drop. another mistake that people make is when they go to pull with the wheelie instead of having their arms locked they'll basically pull and bring their arms in and do the t-rex arms like we talked about in the manual video so no t-rex arms that is the worst thing that happens because it immediately makes your bike want to loop out and so that's a mistake I see a lot of people make. So if any of these sound like you and you want some help keep watching and we will help April figure it out too! First thing first we're gonna have her do some wheelies pre coaching see what her technique looks like. I will kind of point out a few things and then we'll put her in the bike stand I'll coach her through the proper technique and then we're gonna try to get you wheelieing! Sweet! that was pretty good so I don't want to give you guys too much too soon but keep an eye on what her butt does if it comes up off the seat her head position in her arm position just keep an eye on that and we'll talk about it more in a minute that was pretty good that's pretty good all right so let's give you some coaching all right so we got April set up here on our little feedback sports bike stand this is something I like to use a lot for kind of teaching people how to manual or even how to wheelie it just helps them stay in a position where I can just kind of hold them vertically and they don't feel like they're gonna tip side to side but rule number one that we're gonna do for a wheelie and for a manual rule number one of all wheelies and all manuals always cover your rear brake so what I mean by that is you always want to have your finger over the rear brake that way if you do start to go too high you start to loop out you can tap it and buy yourself a little bit of time or you can grab it and it'll help set the front end down and then a lot of times they'll hear people say modulate your brake and what does that mean what that means by modulate your brake means instead of doing a full hard squeeze you're gonna basically do like like a nice light pull you'll feel it contact and from there you can do small little pulses and that's what modulation means so when I do a wheelie if I'm doing a long wheelie basically I'll get to the point where I can feel my pads touch the rotor and then I'm kind of just modulating so if I'm starting to go back a little bit I just do a light squeeze if I'm starting to drop a little bit I'll let off and have the wheel free up a bit so that's what it means i modulate does that make sense okay and then the next thing we're gonna talk about is our feet so coming into the wheelie you're gonna basically be coming in a nice like cruising speed coasting in the wheelie and instead of having your feet level I personally like to have my front foot up at about 12 o'clock position and my bottom foot at 6 o'clock so all right left foot forward so what I do is I take my left foot and I bring it back up I kind of come into the wheelie like this and then right as I want to go pop I do a slight compression with my arms I lean back and then I pedal and those three things need to meet all at once does that help ok so that's how I like to do it people like to do it different ways some people do 45 some people do you know somewhere in between 45 and that 12 o'clock but that's how I like to do it from here we're going to go through the different seat positions one of the mistakes I see is people will either have their see too low or too high and I'm going to show you why that is a big deal and it really matters where you have your seat so from here I'm gonna start lifting you up so head up looking ahead and then basically we're gonna go up up up up up arms lock so with your seat down that's her balance point right here that's where I can do very little that's why she that's why I don't want you to have your seat down so that's too high right okay so now put your seat up to full extension so now let's go ahead and find her balance point so from here so right here is her balance point so do you see the difference so now that she has her seat all the way up and her legs fully extended when she peddles and her legs kind of get to that almost locked out position it's gonna make her weight shift like that and so that's really hard to stay in a wheelie position so let's go ahead and do like a mid height that looks about good alright so this is in a mid seat height and this is why it's so important so let's go ahead and bring you up. head up. so in the mid position this is about where her balance point is so it's lower than when the seat is all the way down it's a little bit higher than the seat is up but her knees aren't gonna be locking out and it's not gonna let her kind of shift from side to side and want her to like lean one way so a lot of times when people do a wheelie and they start leaning left or leaning right because their seat a little bit high and when they fully extend it puts their weight down and it starts to make them lean alright so she's in this wheelie position now a lot of times what people do is they start to get scared because they're in this position and so they start to try to get close to the handle bar so what I'm gonna have her show you is what happens when you crawl forward and you kind of do the t-rex arms because you get scared so bring yourself forward so as she does that do you feel it's starting to go yeah so not only does it make your balance point really really volatile because you're at such a peak right here it makes me want to slide off the back it makes everything kind of fall apart so extend your arms again so now her balance point just dropped so now her balance points about right here she's in a nice neutral position and basically she has this much time before something goes bad but with your arms up so arms in so when her arms are in keep going so if she goes like this then basically this is balance right here and then right there is like dead so balance, dead. Arms extended so here she is pretty much balanced here and then she's good till about there so you have that much movement versus when your arms are kind of crouched up you have such a small balance area that's why you always want to have your arms extended doing this and doing a manual last thing that we're just going to go over really quick if things do start to go wrong and you didn't follow rule number one which is cover your rear break and you start to loop out this is how you want to bail so I'm gonna have her practice with the seat low that way it's kind of the easiest for her to step back off but the nice thing about a wheelie versus a manual is that you're seated so you do have support there and all that I do is basically as I get up to the top and I start to loop out I just take both my feet off at the same time and bring them out to the side and you'll kind of like slide off the back of the seat so that's the easiest way don't try to ride it out you'll end up like a turtle so don't do that just basically if you come up feet go out to the side and you'll slide off the back. Im gonna bring her up we're gonna get up past the balance point so she's right about here and then on three I'm gonna let you go okay okay one two three cool that's perfect so that's a bail both feet out to the side slide off the back of the seat. good job! I would say covering the break and learning how to bail are the two most important things because that'll keep you safe and then it just takes a lot of practice and we'll see how you do today like I said our goal is to get up and do a couple revolutions and we'll be happy with that so let's see how it goes all right so she looks like she's actually in a pretty good gear. it's good torque gear, not too hard but I think basically you're just going a little bit too slow so we're just gonna try it same thing that was her first try so it's totally fine but just come in a little tiny bit faster and everything else look good all right number three yeah this attempt was way better but I want you to keep an eye on her top foot and her arms basically she pedals slightly early before her arms are fully extended which doesn't allow her to get the pop she needs she also started to drop her head it's a very subtle difference but that's the difference between getting the pop that you need and being a little bit low in this example you can see that I begin my pedal stroke just as my arms are beginning to lock out this makes the front end as light as possible when I start to pedal for the wheelie and it allows the front end to get up into the right position the timing between the pedal stroke and the arms locking out is very key and you'll notice that more as a video goes on. this time see if you can spot it so her pedals start to move just before her arms lock out that caused her to not get quite enough lift do the same thing keep your head up it'd be good yeah! on this attempt she did a way better job getting some preload in her arms she also got the timing between her arms extending and the pedal stroke perfect that's why she got such a good lift even though it surprised her a little bit you almost looped her haha. oh that was good! At least getting the point where I'm like looping yeah are you covering your brake? so what just clicked for me is the same thing that clicked with my drops and it was the rider position where when I go first if I had my head with the bars or stem then I could get more of a pop that I was trying that was missing yeah when she was doing just that little movement there wasn't really enough weight transfer happening to get the bike to kind of shift and unweight the front end I always try to tell people think about yourself like a spring and sometimes you need to load everything so get really compressed and then explode if you're not getting enough lift chances are you're just doing a little shift so alright I think you have all the fundamentals it just when's it gonna all come together in one sweet wheelie so we'll just do a couple or run she's only been like about 20 tries maybe so huge strides and 20 tries so we'll see if we can get a good one here in a minute so what you do different on that one? I picked a spot to look at that was way ahead yeah so she looked all the way down there I hope you guys can see it but there's a yellow sign kind of way down there so I told her to look at that and she used her point of reference to keep her head up. This one looked awesome timing was good posture is good she kept her head up everything looks perfect and I think it's just a matter of time before she gets this thing dialed that looked really good like I think that you have everything down and this is a matter of getting all the pieces together at once. Yeah! Alright Lets do a couple more on this one everything came together timing was there she's in a good posture her head is slightly down which is why she eventually dropped but that just comes with practice and I'm super proud of her! That was awesome! I think that was pretty much what we were trying to get today! it's almost impossible to learn wheelies and get like long ones in a day however now she has the right technique, she knows what to do she's getting the pop and I mean the difference from the first wheelie of the day so that last one was like night and day difference and we've been out here for like an hour just kind of practicing and trying to do a bunch of different runs and yeah that was awesome! what are some of the things that you learned that helped you kind of click in your head there are a lot of things we learned but for me personally the best thing was keeping my head up I think just trying to figure out the right speed the right gear for me and especially holding the rear brake in case I loop out haha! yeah totally! You did awesome! thank you! So hopefully this helps you guys out, if you have any questions or anything definitely throw them in the comments section the goal of this video was to just help you guys understand the proper technique and then from here she just needs more practice and once those little movements become second nature and you go alright I don't have to think about when to pedal and I'll have to think about when to pop and I'll have to think about these things then you'll just get those long wheelie and yeah it just takes some practice but you did awesome it's a good job and I hope you guys like this video if you could click like that would be awesome and if you could subscribe that would be great too and like I said if you have any questions or comments or anything throw em in the comments section we'll try to get to those soon as you can so good job April! Thanks! Yeah see you later! Thank you so much for watching our Video! this is actually real speed you guys..... That wasnt actually slo mo haha

Channel: Kyle & April - Ride MTB

Views: 3,429,026

Rating: 4.9335389 out of 5

Keywords: mountain biking, kyle warner, ride mtb, ride mtb podcast, april zastrow, learning to mountain bike, how to mountain bike, niner bikes, learn to wheelie, how to wheelie, ride mtb coaching

Id: 3j6Y8vsQ3d4

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020