How to ride a hardtail

oh my goodness hey this is long with single track skills uh the purpose of the video is to demonstrate that the skills that i teach work even on a hard tail i'm approaching 55 and i wanted to do this project before i got any older because the hardtail is not very nice to my back and my knees and everything else so i got it done hope you enjoy and hope it's helpful see what we would do differently on a hardtail as a as opposed to a full suspension bike one of the things i've noticed right off is that a hardtail since it doesn't have any give in the back um it has a tendency to feel like it's wanting to buck you a lot so i've already had to make some adjustments on it it's almost sent me over the handlebars a couple times because my brain is used to that rear suspension so probably the first thing is give yourself some time if you're going to ride a hard tail to get your brain adjusted to what it feels like that rear wheel is hanging up it's almost the same feeling if you short a jump and you kind of case it your rear will case it has that same kind of feeling so uh technique and skill uh will actually prevail uh over um the uh the suspension the rear suspension of the bike um i brought my buddy javier on this on these filming uh he he's helped me a lot over the years we've kind of helped each other with our skills and um he's going to demo some of the harder lines that i'm not able to get um but we're we're trying to use the same type of skills so let's get it done [Applause] [Applause] um this is a paradox this is the model and it's made by banshee it is an aluminum hardtail and um i really like it i wanted to go with titanium but titanium is literally like three times the price of the aluminum and banshee makes i think the best aluminum out there it's the 7000 series whatever that means i'm not an engineer but they've also most companies are only using the 6000 series which i don't think is quite as good and um the way that they've engineered this um one of the guys who's on youtube uh hardtail party he actually has a review between this and another brand's titanium and he said it's just almost like splitting hair so this is obviously not a cross-country bike um but it's as close to a cross-country bike as i can ride without tearing it up because if i brought a pure cross-country bike to this feature that javier just rode uh we we had in it tearing up but have a smaller fork it's just not made the geometry is not quite made for this kind of stuff so if you're going to go the hardtail route i would definitely get this or something similar to this if you're wanting to ride hard hard features if you're not wanting to ride hard features and just easy features all the time then you you know you can choose another type of hardtail somewhere there aren't a lot of difficult features a hardtail would be a great thing to to get to keep things interesting um if you live in an area where there are harder and harder features and you're getting older and older hardtail is probably not the best thing to get so another thing that javier and i just learned about riding a hardtail is on this line that i just did coming up here down into that ravine and over that rock i was riding it like i normally do with a lot more speed coming into it to make it up this off camber i must have tried it five times i didn't make it because i was bouncing all over the place and i didn't have traction so he had a keen eye and what he recommended is that i swing a little bit wider come in a little slower and then just put a little bit of a pedal stroke in in right coming up instead of coasting in at high speed and i eventually made it i think i tried it twice and the second time i made it so the take away from that experience in terms of riding a hardtail sometimes you're going to have to go a little slower because since there's no rear suspension it's bouncing you around a lot more and losing traction so you have to slow it down a little bit more precise and control with putting power down those of you who have had me in clinics before have heard me say that flat pedals are safer and uh clipless pedals are faster but i think on the uh i think on a hardtail like this the clipless may actually be safer and faster because no matter how active your feet are on the hardtail a lot of times i would end up losing a pedal here and there just because i can't keep my my feet you know super active like i need to so that's that's one difference between a full suspension and a hardtail i also didn't mention that i have a um a 130 millimeter travel fork on that bike so some may find that interesting uh it's a cane creek helm so it's really well built and the frame itself the banshee frame is really well built uh you can tell it's it's it's a boss for sure in closing i've got a video of me riding down blood rock which is a very popular section of trail at my home's trail system and i'm demoing it on the hardtail for one of my classes i also have some still photo shots of me riding up it on the hardtail i was able to conquer riding up all of blood rock except for one short section which is the hardest section on that feature it is more difficult to ride up something like that on a hardtail because the uh travel and a full suspension bike actually helps you with the with the traction in the rear now what i've found is the more travel you have in the rear the harder it is but a sweet spot is like a 115 millimeter travel uh my banshee uh bike with the 115 millimeter travel is perfect for climbing up blood rock my larger travel bike with 160 in the rear is more difficult um so anyway i'll i'll end it with um some still shots of me climbing up it i also want to give a shout out to my buddy uh david passmore david passmore with dirt life designs he's a great photographer if you want to get some good shots of writing some features he's he's your man and i also want to shout out to bike link bike link of hoover and they they're a are a local bike shop where you can buy any of the banshee frames uh and any of the components that i mentioned um i love the company it's a great company and well all three of the companies banshee bike link and dirt life design so yeah hopefully this has been helpful and give me a give me a shout out in the comments and let me know what you think correction it's actually dirt life media designs on instagram is where you can catch david pass more not dirt life designs my bad you

Channel: Singletrack Skills

Views: 13,668

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Id: rCmeUS9CJlA

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022