How To Use A Manual Machine To Improve Your Skills

today we're going to talk to you about manual trainer um we did a video building one of these a few weeks ago and in the comments there are a lot of people asking is it even worth building why would you need one and just general questions about using it one thing i see brought up a lot is people saying it's not even worth building one but a lot of times the people that are saying that are people that have already learned how to manual and they've kind of forgotten how scary it is to figure out where the balance point is and just getting your front wheel up the first time so i know for a fact that this has helped april a ton just getting more comfortable with manually and today we'll kind of show you how we set it up and how we get the most out of it we're going to go over a few things the first of which being whether you should have your chain on or your chain off a lot of people that i see using these they'll just put their bike in and use it with the chain on which is totally fine it just gives you a little bit more stability so it's kind of an easier way to learn getting up and staying in that balance point so it's like way too stable but if you want a real challenge and if you want to try to mimic an actual manual taking the chain off is an awesome way to make this more difficult and learn how to manual properly so what we're going to have april do is she's going to take the chain off really quick and show you guys how she sets it to get high enough to get the balance point but not too far to where you're looping out so have you go ahead and do that and then we'll kind of walk through things to look at when you're using a manual trainer all right so april got this all set up and basically she limited it to where she can get into the manual point but it's not going to let her go all the way back and kind of loop out it's pretty fun having this ability because then you can learn where the balance point is and i think it's a little bit higher than most people tend to think you know when you first get on you just go to lift and you're like oh it must be like right here but it's actually a lot higher than you think so that's one thing this is really great for i want to address a question though that we see a lot which is can this damage your wheel and to be honest with you i don't know we haven't had that issue yet and we have like some aluminum stands wheels which are pretty sturdy but i think depending on your weight and the quality and type of wheel that you do have it could potentially be an issue um and as long as you get comfortable kind of bailing off to the side instead of just you know if you do start to lean if you just hold on to your bike the whole time that's not good but we haven't had an issue yet and april's been using this quite a bit and i used one in the past quite a bit so yeah if you're worried about that don't worry too much but depending on your weight and depending on the wheel it could potentially be an issue so that being said let's talk about a few of the things that this is really great at doing and a few of the things it's not so great at doing biggest thing that it's not great at doing is mimicking the actual pop to get up into the manual and the reason it's not the best at that is because when you're going at speed and you actually go to pop for a manual you kind of push your legs out a little bit just to kind of push the bike out and get into that position on this since the rear wheel is fixed you don't really have that ability and so that's the one thing that it doesn't mimic very well and i think that's something that people will say is you know it helps me learn how to balance but it doesn't really help me get that pop so is that kind of what you felt too yeah i was actually reviewing a video of me doing it before and i saw the pop forward that i was doing in real life and you definitely can't do that yeah so that being said one little hack that we have is if you're just focused on getting the balance point correct because that's what you're really working on here is getting your balance correct and you want to make the pop a little easier you can actually stack some two by fours or two by sixes under the front wheel and the higher you stack it the easier the lift will be so you want to show them that maybe okay this first one she's gonna do with no um boards under the front wheel and so it's gonna be the most difficult to get up and then we'll use our little hack put a few boards under and then she'll see if it's easier oh that was pretty good yeah okay so try try one more time sweet that's pretty good too okay all right so this time usually i struggle we're gonna put two boards under so try one there way easier huh yeah so that was perfect because she started to fall sideways and she kind of just bailed off the bike a little bit and that's what i think you need to really focus on if you are worried about your wheel getting damaged i think if you went up into that high position and then you just held on you could definitely torque something i did tap the rear brake for habit and then i let it out yeah totally so that's one thing to work on as well so let's kind of show you guys how you can find your balance position and it really changes a lot depending on how long your femurs are so if you have really long legs and your hips are back on the back of the bike you'll have a lower manual point and if you have shorter legs then you'll have to be a lot higher so i'll show you how to find that really quick so the way i'm gonna do this is i'm gonna actually help april get up into the manual and we're gonna go until she kind of finds a point where she can really just tap the break and move her body a little bit and she's balanced there one two three okay so a lot of times we'll see people with their strap completely tight here and they're kind of just pulling against the strap that's not what we want what we wanna do is right here if i drop her she starts to fall so i'm gonna just keep pushing back and then right about here she's right there in that little equilibrium spot so she kind of can stay there grab your break for a second so you can kind of hold yourself if you need to for a second just get a feel for that and she's doing a really good job of looking ahead that's one thing i see a lot of people do is they look down so look ahead drop that front heel that's something that she always struggles with and that'll get your weight down further and back further so right there she's in a good balance point there's still a little bit of slack here and then if she goes too far then it'll kind of catch her and then you can just step off the back or to the side that's kind of the proper way to use it is to have a little bit of slack there so when you're in your manual point you can actually balance there once you have your manual point set you can tighten that so you don't have to go as far back so you can kind of save it a bit more but yeah have you noticed any other things that have helped you with this definitely easier with the blocks just the first time you try with blocks be careful yes you don't pull too hard i did that last time yeah all right so i'm gonna have april go up and she's gonna do a couple things wrong and then we're just gonna talk about how to correct those and what you should kind of see in an ideal manual okay ready okay so this is one thing i see a lot of people do which is they keep their arms bent especially as they come up they get kind of scared they'll go forward so relax and straighten there you go that looks really good and then another thing i'll see people do is they'll have their head down what this does is it shifts your weight down if you can get your head up then it really helps you bring your weight back so she's doing that pretty much all on her own right now another thing too is your front heel this one's hard a lot of people will extend their leg like that if you can drop your heel it drops your weight quite a bit because most your weight will be in that front foot and it'll help you kind of get a lower center of gravity and be more stable when you're like this you have your weight sunk into that front heel when you're like this it kind of puts your weight in a weird spot a little bit further forward and you want your weight to be down and low and i think it makes me straighten my leg yeah a lot of times it'll do that too where if you have your front foot like this it straightens your leg if you go like that it helps you stay in a bend really when you're in a manual the way that you keep in the manual is by doing small adjustments by pushing your hips back and forth so you want to kind of show them i'll try okay so she's going to try and then if not i'll kind of walk you guys through a couple things and she can be my coach that was good you want me to do a couple too yeah okay so april's doing a really great job there's a few things that it might be easier to show you really quick so i'm gonna hop on and then show you guys a couple tips like we talked about earlier we ride left foot forward what that means is that when we throw our weight back a lot of times people will have a tendency to throw their weight to their back hip and it kind of puts you off to the side of the bike a little bit so what we really want to try to think about is your weight being in the center of your body and then getting thrown back not off to one of the sides when i go up to do a manual what i'm going to make sure i'm doing is that i'm going to have my legs be bent a little bit heel down and what that's going to let me do is as i kind of get my weight to throw back then i'll be able to push my legs back a little bit so if i'm not getting quite enough lift then i can push back and get my weight back further so one two three so so basically this is my balance point and i'm using my brake and my legs to balance here so just kind of feeling that balance point so if you watch my finger i'm tapping my break quite a bit and then push back and i'm always keeping my eyes up the worst thing you can do is look down it makes it way less stable or look too far up because then if you're looking too far up a lot of times it makes your chest too tight and you don't really have like a relaxed posture you get tired really quick so that was like a mini coach session for her too but she's doing a really good job so let's try one more time really quick okay so legs squatted yeah so forward back and then push your legs out yeah so that was good like right here it's gonna be hard for her to move because she's so low so what you're gonna have to do is bring your body up a little bit there you go like that and then you'll be a little higher so that's like a good manual position for april right there now she can kind of heal down that's the hardest tip for her so right there you're balanced perfect does that feel good there you go oh cool all right guys i hope you enjoyed this video um like we said building a manual trainer it's really fun way to pass time especially when it's snowing or raining outside you can just practice in the house for 30 minutes or so and what this really does a good job of is it helps you put a few of those thoughts out of your conscious head you kind of work on them in here and then it can live in your subconscious so when you go to actually do a manual on the trail you know where you need to be you know where you need to look you know where your heel needs to be all those little things so that's the best way to learn anything is get things out of your head so you can just focus on what you're doing at the time so yeah and another cool feature is this works really great as a bike stand and i've seen a few people put a pad just a little space around the back so you can store it vertically we have a link in the description to how to build this and also put one right here and i think it was around 30 total so it's really affordable really fun tool to have and definitely think you guys should build one anything you want to say just have fun building it and have fun using it all right well thank you guys for watching we'll talk to you soon bye i suck i suck

Channel: Kyle & April - Ride MTB

Views: 193,769

Rating: 4.9617338 out of 5

Keywords: mountain biking, kyle warner, ridemtb.com, ridemtb, ride mtb, ride mtb podcast, how to mountain bike, april zastrow, Kyleandapril, Manual Trainer, How To Manual, How to build A manual trainer, manual a bike, Manual machine, how to build a manual machine, How to use a manual machine

Id: lhew2Lk-VX0

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021