How To Land Smoother - Progression Session #3 - Reduce Impact On Your Bike & Body

hey what's up guys today we're gonna do a fun little video on how to land so the biggest thing we're gonna work on today is basically getting that moment of energy when you land and trying to spread it out a little bit longer so using your legs to absorb it and actually kind of almost like a parkour person when they jump and instead of landing flat sometimes you'll see them roll that's them basically taking that energy and spreading it out the way that we're gonna do this we have a mountain bike hopper ramp and we just have it set up to flat if you don't have access to a ramp you can use either a curb dropping off a curb and trying to land soft or if you find someone with a driveway that has a little bit of a curb cut then those are really nice too to practice this stuff you excited for today yeah it's something that you've mentioned to me quite a bit and i'm excited to finally spend some time actually focusing on just landing yeah all right so this is the little ramp setup that we have today and it's about a foot or so to flat what we're gonna kind of listen for is how hard the tires are impacting the ground and also watching like how much the ankles are absorbing i'll show you guys an example of what not to do so landing really hard and then we'll show you an example of just a soft landing and then we'll have april start practicing onto different techniques that looks about right so the biggest thing to look at there for one is just the sound so how hard the bike is impacting the ground and then number two is kind of you'll see me rebound almost a little bit because i'm putting so much force into the bike it has to go somewhere on the way out so you'll get that little bit of bounce or rebound and my ankles take a lot of impact too on this one i'm gonna try to land nice and soft and hopefully you'll hear a quieter landing and you'll see less kind of bounce as i land so let's try that this is a little bit quieter landing so balan didn't hurt my neck nearly as bad the whole point of today's video is learning how to land softly for one so that your body doesn't take the abuse and for two so your bike doesn't take as much abuse like i said that first one really hurt my neck that's something i'll see a lot of people say is like oh my back or my neck you know after doing a big day of jumping and i think today we're gonna work on just that timing and technique of when your tires touch the ground how do you start absorbing that and what actually needs to move to get the most absorption so you ready april yeah all right you got your little hardtail yeah sick let's just have you hit it a few times on your own just normal and then we'll look at what's going on and see if we can get the technique a little bit better and walk through how to do that okay have you hit this on hard tail no oh my god that looks pretty soft yeah it looked beautiful it was like a marshmallow landing try one more okay attempt number two that looks a little better yeah let's try one more this is one good one a little faster how'd that feel not very good because i think i'm not used to riding on the hardtail yeah i can tell that i use my suspension a lot more yeah you want to try one on the suspension bike just to show them that too sure just as a comparison real quick yeah okay cool all right comparison test on the full suspension okay cool i think we have some good stuff we can work on for sure so those were a couple really good attempts and i think there's a few things we can work on that are really common problems for a lot of people so as she's landing her legs are bent which is a really good position to be in like you want a soft bend you never really want to land straight legged so she does have her legs bent but they're tight and so when she lands even though her legs are bent she lands and her ankles absorb a lot of the impact i've seen people like strain their achilles in the past from basically landing and having it bend too much so we're really gonna try to work on is as soon as your bike comes off the ramp so you're gonna jump off the ramp you're in the air thinking about your landing and right as your tires touch the ground i personally kind of like to land on flat ground rear tire slightly first or completely even on a slope transition i almost always try to land both tires at the same time like even landing and right as she feels the tires touch the ground he's gonna softly absorb that impact with her legs i see a lot of times where people will land kind of stiff leg and then they'll almost go like that to absorb it that's not really what we're focusing on we want to just use our legs as the biggest strongest part of our body and absorb that so as soon as the tires touch the ground just that nice little movement so you want to be at one with the bike at one with the bike young padawan does that kind of make sense it does make sense because i feel like a lot of times that'll hurt my ankles when i jump yeah if i have a hard landing it's usually my ankles that hurt yeah totally and hopefully if we do it right you'll hear your tires really softly land on the ground um that's what we're really listening for and that's why we have the hardtails out here because on the full suspension sometimes it can be kind of tough to know if you landed soft or if your suspension absorbed it what's going on but with these you can really hear it quite a bit a lot of times you'll see people land and hear their tires hit and then absorb and that's a little bit of absorption but what we really want is we want to kind of i'll just do it on my feet but if i was to jump instead of going straight leg or you want to just land yeah so it's timing as well yeah that's the biggest thing that people struggle with is the timing you are a cat i'm a heavy cat you're a heavy cat all right try one more it'll take some practice so no stress i'm not moving my legs right yeah what did that feel like i felt like i was all doing it in the arms yeah okay that's a really common thing i see all right so april's gonna hold me up so i'm in a riding position right so i'll see people land and go boom that's like just hip hinge movement what we're gonna really try to focus on for a soft landing is as you come down bike hits the ground knees compress hips compress so it's like a nice okay does that make sense yeah so you kind of do use your arms but you don't want to be over the front like that we're going to go one two three okay a squat pop and then squat boom that was perfect that looks really good so same motion let's do one more just a squat one two three boom yeah okay looks good yeah basically there's a squat okay yeah all right so just some flat ground practice nice and smooth these are legs more suspense yeah there you go smooth cat there you go that look good you feel like a pro all right let's try it on the jump okay so this might seem a little bit ridiculous but i promise this is one of the most important skills to have and not only will it help you on jumps it'll help you on drops and also just learning how to use your body to absorb things on a lot of bikes you'll have like between four and six inches of suspension and what that is really good at is maintaining traction but you have so much more suspension in your body so if you can learn how to use that to your advantage and really get that nice smooth absorption that'll help a ton so i'm excited to see if april can get this because she's been hitting bigger jumps and i've been noticing some hard landings so that's why we're really focusing on it today nice that's getting there yo yo did you feel that yeah it's super smooth i feel like what's helping me is just to be like looser looser i feel like i'm usually like so tense or like i need to like yeah be looser yeah it looks a lot better thanks well we'll try now is just for fun we'll just do full suspension and see how that feels but like i said um i mean this took me years to really get to be smooth and i think a lot of times you'll see people that just don't pay attention to this you know it's like i want to learn how to jump it's like we got to learn how to land at some point too so yeah let's try full suspension see how that feels okay cool good job thanks i was sick you're a quiver full suspension that looks a lot better it feels so much softer than the hard scale [Laughter] yeah that was perfect yeah that was really good i stable and that on a good note that was really good yeah you look perfect really thanks that was sick especially compared to the first few runs like we'll do first run and then now just this last one yeah like night and day difference that's cool do you feel like you could tell a big difference it hurts less it hurts less yeah um yeah like i was saying with april progressing so much and jumping the past few months just as we're hitting bigger jumps it's fine when you lance you know on a good landing the technique isn't as important but i've seen a few times where like when she's gonna case something she doesn't really have the technique to absorb it so that's why we just wanted to focus on this today we haven't done a dedicated day of practice and we figured with the hopper ramp is perfect like i said you can also use like a curb just come off of a curb and try to land soft or you can go out of like a curb cut and try to get those little jumps um what were the tips that you felt helped the most i think it was really good to practice on flat ground first just to get that motion and and maybe that helps loosen up your legs too i feel like i'm usually too tense and just feeling or loosening my body a little bit helped a lot to move my legs yeah that's cool all right thank you guys so much for watching and kind of practicing with us today i think landing is one of those things where a lot of people don't spend enough time working on it and it can save you big time in a pinch if you know how to land say you overshoot a jump land a flat or if you're coming into case something and you just need to absorb it just having that skill is so important and yeah it's fun practicing with you yeah thanks for helping me yeah if you guys have any questions or comments definitely throw them down below and if you have any ideas for the next few videos let us know we're always open to suggestions and we'll try to get to that stuff as soon as we can so yeah thank you guys and we'll talk to you next time oh i'm a heavy cat you're a heavy cat all right

Channel: Kyle & April - Ride MTB

Views: 52,939

Rating: 4.9925346 out of 5

Keywords: mountain biking, kyle warner, ridemtb.com, ridemtb, ride mtb, ride mtb podcast, ride mtb coaching, how to mountain bike, april zastrow, Kyleandapril, how to jump, how to land, learning to ride

Id: THLrzW8ks3A

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021