How To Be More Efficient When Riding Your Dirt Bike w/Josh Knight

do you find yourself getting tired quickly when riding or do you suffer from a lot of arm pump today we're going to be talking about how to ride more efficiently on your dirt bike [Music] [Music] welcome to the rocky mountain atv mc youtube channel i'm josh knight with ridewithnights.com and today we're going to be talking about a few of my favorite tips to help you ride more efficiently on your dirt bike so what does efficiency really mean when riding well we're all riding the same obstacles we're all riding similar equipment 200 plus pound dirt bikes we're riding very similar obstacles similar conditions with obscured vision and why is it that some riders are able to maintain more energy while others hit fatigue or tire out a lot quicker i'm going to share some of my favorite tips to help you save energy and ride more efficiently on your bike one of the first things that i like to talk about with efficiency is teaching riders how to use the engine rather than their muscles to control and make adjustments when riding the bikes a lot of the times when we're riding sand or different types of obstacles we have to make these slight little adjustments to maintain our balance and correctly navigate the obstacles that are ahead and a lot of times we feel like we need to move and muscle the bike around with our arms this is a very short game strategy and you're going to fatigue very quickly by using the power and the engine inside your motorcycle you'll be able to make these equip these adjustments very fast and pretty much effortlessly so specifically when riding sand try and look for opportunities to use the motor to get into that that line or to make that adjustment that you need to and save your muscles for the control features another great example is when you're trying to navigate possibly a ditch or a log in off-road terrain you're going to want to use 95 of the power coming from the engine your arms are there pretty much to just guide the motorcycle and you're going to lift a little bit with your arms but most and the majority of your power is going to come from the engine and using your arms and upper body just as a guide my second tip for riding more efficiently is to utilize your legs and your body's natural suspension now we cover this in depth in a lot of our other videos specifically our attack position video go ahead and check that out if you haven't seen it already however by utilizing your legs and your body's natural suspension you're going to increase your range of motion and put your body in a position that is intended to move the attack position is the most offensive and defensive position and by utilizing our legs and our larger muscles on our body we're going to be able to save our arms and our upper body and have more stamina and endurance for the long run also by using our legs you're going to help disengage your lower half from your upper half this is one of the most common mistakes i see beginner riders make is not getting their hips far enough back on the motorcycle what happens is every time they're incurring an impact whether it's breaking bumps on the motocross track or whoops and rocks in the off-road terrain in the desert these impacts and this force is translating all the way up through their body into their shoulders and their neck and their head our bodies have the ability to absorb a lot of this impact and force so be sure to practice using your legs and your body's natural suspension my next tip is to teach yourself to understand your own intensity zones so imagine yourself riding at your fastest speed your all-out sprint that's a hundred percent now depending on the type of ride or race that you're doing if it's on a motocross track or if you're trail riding competing in a two or three hour desert race you're going to need to use discretion as to how long you sustain each of these zones even the fastest off-road riders or motocross riders they often can't sustain their 100 intensity for the entire duration of the race so in your own practice familiarize yourself with your own intensity one of my favorite ways to do this is to utilize a heart rate monitor and collect some data you can use your smart watch you can use a chest strap and familiarize yourself with your zones this is going to allow you to know how your body reacts to certain intensities and give yourself more experience to control this in the future when i'm riding a motocross track i'll be at a much higher intensity for a shorter duration however if i go to an off-road race i need to make sure that at some point i start to tone it down and get to a level that's sustainable one of the common mistakes that i see beginner riders make is going out at the beginning of a race and exerting way too much energy at the beginning of the race and just blowing through all of their energy so practice in your own riding familiarizing yourself with this type of intensity the next tip to riding more efficiently on your dirt bike is to learn how to carry your momentum i always like to say that it's always going to be faster to use speed that you already have versus trying to make up speed later now the way this translates to a motocross track or off-road terrain is say you have a straightaway and then a corner on the straightaway you're going to get up to speed and during the obstacle or the corner it's going to require you to slow down a little bit oftentimes beginner riders will accelerate really hard on the straightaway and then they'll break really hard in the corner and have to make up all that speed after rather than focusing so much on accelerating hard and braking hard learn to just carry the speed that you already have through obstacles try and link sections of the off-road course or the motocross track together this is going to allow you to carry momentum from corner to corner and you're going to be using far less energy you're going to have to accelerate less and break less and you're just going to carry speed through obstacles another tip for efficiency is learning how to control your breathing and mentality i'm often so surprised at how effective this actually works and when you're using if you do end up using some heart rate data you can really dig in and analyze how much your breathing actually affects your heart rate and therefore your efficiency but often even in the most intense situations if you can just proactively control your breathing and slow it down you can often bring your beats per minute down 10 or 15 which is really going to equate to a lot more efficiency so when you're riding simply the biggest step that you can do right now beginning today is to simply be aware of your own breathing when you're riding the second component to that is simply mentality oftentimes riders are so concerned about the environment and everything that's going on around them that they're exerting a lot of energy on things that just don't matter or that they just don't have control over when you're racing understand that everybody else or even if you're just trail riding or riding the motocross track understand that everybody else is going through the same thing you are they're struggling with the same obstacles and the same vision and so if you can just focus your energy on what you can control you'll save a little bit all of these different layers kind of add together to save just a little bit of energy in each area and allow you to ride more efficiently another tip to help you ride more efficiently is to focus on properly setting up your bike specifically the control features i see so many beginner riders riding around with busted clutch levers and bent handlebars and it's not allowing them to develop proper riding techniques and it's for sure not allowing them to ride as efficiently as they can be sure to maintain your bike to the best of your abilities make sure that you properly set up your control features specifically to set up your your brake and clutch levers in a position that allows you to use them with the least resistance possible in both the standing and sitting position oftentimes i see riders not able to to get their hips far enough back or maintain the proper braking position due to where their levers are placed so do some testing in your own time figure out the best position for you i like to run my levers just below parallel with the handlebars this is the least resistance for me and the most effortless the last tip to riding more efficiently is line choice now this really works well once the motocross track starts to develop or off-road terrain is often already kind of rough but if you're racing a race or doing a trail ride you still have many opportunities to look to to save time and energy when riding the motocross track i like to let the track develop and then look for new opportunities to navigate around areas that have a lot of bumps chatter acceleration bumps one of my favorite ways to do this is to simply just step outside of the main line just a few feet and i'm often surprised at how little you actually have to move to avoid some of these bigger bumps but one of the common mistakes i see riders make is just getting in the habit of taking the same line lap after lap after lap and one of the ways to practice this is to take insides take outsides and familiarize yourself with using the full range of the track the full width of the track by doing so you'll gain more experience with going outside to inside or inside the outside one of my favorite lines to actually take is outside to inside often if you were to analyze a motocross track from above every rider is going to go to the inside at first and blow out to the outside and one of the fastest ways and most efficient lines that's a secondary or alternate line is to step outside of that on the corner entry cross the main line and go to the inside in off-road terrain you can use the exact same technique of outside to inside in all sorts of different corners however there are a whole host of new obstacles to use in off-road terrain one of my favorites is actually when navigating long stretches of whoops specifically sand whoops often if you look at the whoop section the deepest and heaviest part of the whoops is always in the center of the trail and if you ride the edge of the trail you can almost decrease the whoop size by like 50 percent and sometimes it gets difficult to maintain that edge so what i'll often do is ride the edge and then cross over to the other side and keep repeating this process to avoid the deepest parts that's just one example of an area where you can change up your line choice to become more efficient on the motorcycle those are just a few of the many different tips that you can use to ride more efficiently on your bike if you have other tips post them in the comment section below and if you like this video subscribe to the rocky mountain atvmc youtube channel for more content just like this visit ridewiththenights.com we have a free one-hour training where we cover all sorts of our favorite off-road riding techniques it's dense it's high value and it can make a difference in your own riding be sure to check out ridewiththenights.com and thank you guys for watching we'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Rocky Mountain ATV MC

Views: 18,087

Rating: 4.9710145 out of 5

Keywords: Rocky Mountain ATV/MC, rmatv, rmatvmc, motocross, rockymountainatv, dirt bike, motorcycle, off road, josh knight, dirt bike tips, riding tips, ride with the knights, how to ride a bike more efficiently, off road riding techniques, off road riding tips, dirt bike techniques, how to, motorcycle riding, arm pump motocross, efficiency, efficient, dirt bike riding, motocross tips, motocross tips to get faster, how to ride efficiently

Id: Z8wWmZ5dBOA

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021