HOW TO MANUAL A BIKE OVER 40. The video I wish a saw BEFORE I started!

Whoa, nice. Today's video is about manuals and it's not for the 17 year olds. This is for the over 30, over 40, over 50. This video is the video I wish I would have seen. I watched dozens of videos and in the first few weeks they came along pretty good but then I ate it and I landed on my tailbone and then I landed on my tailbone two days later and the ability to pull back and get it high enough was gone for six months. Manuals are a journey. They're not a destination. You're never done. I've had a few breakthroughs and I've had lots of things go wrong so we're gonna just make the video that if you're over 30, over 40, over 50, over 60, over 70 and you're learning to manual and you should because it's good for the noggin, it's good for the body, it's good for the soul, then this is that video. So we'll get started. Mostly I ride mountain bikes. Sean mostly rides mountain bikes but the reason we're on BMX bikes is because this is the great teacher. Your bunny hops, your 180s, your manuals, all this stuff translates directly to the dirt jumper and to the mountain bikes. So that's why we're on BMX bikes today. Step one, you're gonna want to get a pillow or a cushion. It's pretty common to land on this area. I'm kidding. I literally had a friend who tried to do this and gave up. I have other friends who looped out manuals and it hurts a lot and they gave up. So the first step is learning to loop out. When you start the manual, inevitably you'll pull too far back and you want to get off before you hit your tailbone. I think the easiest thing to do is try and over lean back and just get off the back of the bike. So as you lean back, when you come back too far, just be ready to get off. I'll do one. We'll just throw the bike in general. Better that than land on your butt. So you want to make sure that you're kicking the bike away as you feel it going past 12 o'clock. You kick it away and you land on both feet. You're just going walking speed and you just get back and you get too far back. Kick the bike away, land on both feet. If you don't practice this, you're going to try to save yourself with one foot. It doesn't work. I wish I saw a video that said do that 100 times, 200 times. That can save you in all sorts of situations from the mountain bike to the dirt jumper. Starting to get lower with it so that you can kick it away when you're in that really low manual position. I'll do one more and try to be kind of low with it and show what that looks like. So you can be really low and still save it. I don't do manuals with brakes. Sean does manuals with brakes. When you're learning and you're learning to loop out and you're learning on a BMX, I would suggest no brakes. When you're up like this and you grab the brake and you're looping, it locks your feet to the pedals. You can't jump off because the bike's stopping and you will land on your butt. So I kind of think when you're getting going, forget the brake. Get really good at looping out instead. So I would say step two would be decide on a good speed that you feel comfortable with. A little bit of forward momentum is really going to help. The faster you go, the easier a manual is. So what I do to judge is I try and find a speed that is quite a bit slower than I can run, but at the same time faster than I can walk. A little bit faster than a walk, but not quite a run. Somewhere in here. And even at this speed, it's actually slightly harder to balance, but it's a good place to start. Sean suggests doing them slower. I'm going to suggest you can go faster. I'm going to loop one out at a little more speed just to show what running one out looks like because it's not bad. It's all part of the same motion. They're so much easier to do if you're going faster. You will get the same learning from slow ones and fast ones, but you might find more encouragement when you're going a little bit faster because they're going to be longer. Step three would be you're going to initiate the pull for your manual. It's tempting to want to pull the bike into you with your arms, but actually what you want to do is get your center of gravity back behind the bike and specifically kind of your butt. So rather than pull up like this on the bike, I try and lean like my butt over the back tire and there's a little bit of a snap to get it started, but it's really mostly the weight in the back seat. You want your butt to go back or a little bit down. You definitely don't want your butt to go up. You're bending down and you're pushing your arms back, right? The path of your hips, some people say it wants to go like this down and then back. I've also seen people say take it down at a diagonal. I think both work. What doesn't work is if your path of your bottom is sort of up. That puts you in the wrong position. Film yourself because you're going to think your butt's going straight back or down and it's going like this. I don't have the butt awareness of some people, I guess. I had no idea what the path of my behind actually was. The next step is to hold the manual. Once you get up and you're in the right position and your butt's back, the next step is you're going to slowly start to lean too far backwards and then you'll raise up a little bit and then you'll go too far forward and then you go back. So it's this kind of like back and forth motion on the bike to keep the manual going. So once you're in this position, you've got to maintain it and if you watch somebody like Brad Sims, you'll see a ton of hip movement. What he's doing is as the front end starts to fall, he's going to throw his hips back. As the front end starts to come up too high, he brings his hips forward. The more you move, the more range of manual you have, the more ability you have to save one that gets too low. You get way back here, you can get way up here, but lock out your arms because you want to exclude your upper body. Also, some of the worst crashes early on and worst loops are when you throw your hips forward and that's not enough and then you bring your arms in like this and you're really vertical and you're really high. So when you loop those out, those hurt. So you want to avoid those. If you pick some goals to start out, it'll make you try and hold that manual a little bit longer. It's definitely true if you look at parking spots or cracks, you can extend your manuals. It's also true and worth mentioning sometimes when you focus on a crack, as you get there, your head dips a little bit. As your chin dips, it brings the bike down. Demarcus Hall is probably one of the best there is at manuals and I was watching a video with him and he talked about how he never thinks about the distance. He just starts and he just tries to get them to go as long as they can and he keeps his head up. It's definitely worked better for me when I picked out a point that's about four feet off the ground and look at that. Everybody's different. Everybody learns differently and this video is about what I wish someone had told me and I think that that's something I wish someone told me. I wish someone would have told me that the videos where people learn in 10 days or they learn in a month are good for them. I hope it happens but it's probably not what's going to happen. You're going to have good days and you're going to have bad days. Don't give up. I've been working on this for three years. That's embarrassing in some ways but the truth is it's been awesome. What is better than a lot of practice is a little bit of practice consistently. Better to do 20 minutes a day or 20 minutes three times a week than to go out and say I'm going to do six hours of manuals because after a half hour you're going to be tired and there's diminishing returns. So regularity beats just big big sessions. If you like this video hit the like button and if you'd like to see more hit the subscribe button and we'll see you next time on JoyaBike.