MOUNTAIN BIKE DROPS FOR BEGINNERS. DON'T MANUAL OFF DROPS!

Hey YouTube, welcome to the channel. I am here with Lee Likes Bikes, Lee McCormick. Hello. I got a comment from Robin who said, hey will you do a video on drops? My reaction was, well there's so many videos on drops. Kyle has one that's really cool and Rich Drew has one. And he said, I looked at all those and I just can't get confident. And he had made a playlist of all these videos on drops. I watched them all and by the end, I was confused. There's a lot of conflicting advice, right? Absolutely. Let's just start with the one that's really dangerous, which is manualing off drops. There are a lot of those videos. It feels good. Someday you're going to want to do it. But on day one, this is the worst idea possible. If you watch like Pinkbike Friday Fails, it's just crash footage. Like 80, 90% of those crashes are the same mechanism. Kyle and his girlfriend have a really neat video on drops. What I like about it is that he's saying wait until you move your weight backward. What I don't like about it is if you don't time it right, you're still in a situation where your arms are straight. You've expressed maximum range and the only thing left to happen is the front drops and you get tossed. I love that he's saying do it late. He's saying last three boards basically. That's better, yeah, but still sketchy. And so if you watch their videos carefully, you see this a lot on good riders. When they take off, they're not in balance. They're significantly off balance. These guys are really good and they rebalance in the air and they land fine. It's cool. Humbly going to say I've taught around 7,000 people from never ridden a bike before to multiple time world champion. So I've got a data set, you know, that's pretty valid, I think. And most people, when you're out on a precipice and you're off balance and you take off and your body starts getting thrown forward in the air, you don't rebalance like a pro would. You get tense. You freak out. You can't help it. Leaning back is your instinct to get away from danger to save your head, but that's what causes the back tire to hang up and for you to get thrown forward. The other video that's out there that I think gets some of it right is Rich Drew. He doesn't slide back and he keeps his chest down and his elbows bent. The best thing about Rich's video is that he says, get your shoulders close to the bar. Hell yes. The sketchier it gets, the lower you get. I like that. But what he's describing getting forward on the bike, that I'm not a fan of. Always be in the middle of the bike. Always. If you're forward on the bike, you get beaten up and you flop over the bars. If you're back on the bike, you get beaten up and you get flung over the bars. Yeah, catapulted. Too far forward, over the bars. Too far back, over the bars. Middle, safe. You watch the videos, oh, looks like Gabriel did three reps, you know? And that's not the case. If you've gotten to the point where you're traumatized and you know you have poor confidence and you're confused, you need simplicity. You need to be able to practice the same technique when you roll a log, when you roll a rock, when you go a little farther, when you do a big drop. The technique's always the same. That way you get way more reps. We usually use this pier as like our first drop. 14, 15 inches tall with a nice flat landing. If you go faster, it has a beautiful backside to it. We like everything to be simple and consistent. So the rules go like this. Balance on your feet. Hinge and make the angle. So as we approach, we're going to make sure our hands are weightless. If you feel pulling on your fingers, that means you're hanging too far back. If you feel pressure on your palms, it means you're too far forward. In a hinge, we're going to push our butt back and fold our torso to level. This does a couple of rad things for us. It puts our weight in our posterior chain. I'm getting low, hands are weightless, and just push. Hey, put your dropper down. It's interesting. He got exactly low enough to do that drop. It's funny how lazy we are. My recommendation is practice being low. And second, you don't know what's coming in a real trail. So just get low and that way, no matter what happens, you're ready. Not enough people pay attention to what's happening with their hands. You won't know you're forward unless you're checking the weight on your hands. So to know you're in the perfectly centered position, make sure that you're hinged. You've got your chest low to the bars, but your weight is not on your hands. Your hands are there to help you move the bike, not to support your weight. The fundamentals are the same no matter how fast you're going. We're low, we're centered, we make the appropriate angle. When you're going slow, then the bike is dropping really fast. So it's a very serious fast push. Rich Drew style. As you go faster, your trajectory is flatter. So you're not going to give all of your range all at once. It's going to be slower and less. So I'm going to start to ride this faster. And you'll see that as I graduate toward getting air, that I do less. A huge confidence killer is anytime your head gets jostled. That sends a signal of, oh no, and you're going to get tense. You can roll off something that's as tall as your arm is long without your head moving. So like a lot of times with clients, they'll ask, like, can I roll this? Here's a drop. My front tire would land about right here. So I'll put my fist on the ground and I'll compare the height of the rock to the length of my arm. If I can hinge my shoulders all the way to the bar, I can do this. What makes this drop kind of interesting and weird? I think what makes it different is that it's got this deep section. And then the landing is actually comes up and out. And you don't want your front wheel in that hole probably. I would not want my front wheel in the hole. But I also wouldn't even want my front wheel to tap here. Nope. But I really want my front wheel to be at least here. This is a drop where I really wouldn't want to do the Rich Drew school of aggressively throwing. Even if I had a lot of speed, I'm just going to knuckle that the littlest bit on the front and it's going to upset them. I usually give it a little bunny hop off of this thing. I'm going to try it just using our technique. Because what we want to do is we want to have one technique that's going to work for everything. Just go fast, right? I'm going to go fast. Go fast. So his body made a little hop. Did you hop that one? I don't think so. Did I? Yes. But this is important, everybody. Alex did not do the hop. The lizard who lives in the bottom of his head did the hop. And his lizard in the moment said, ooh, I need a little extra clearance. So very subtle push into the feet gave him clearance. All right. That was Kung Fu that time. Don't tell me that I popped that one. You Kung Fu'd it. Okay. And you know what's cool? You just proved an important point. Even I can learn. I always pop for the gap. Yeah, I did too. You don't have to. Add a little bit of speed. Maybe I should go for it. You should definitely do it. How important is it to video yourself? It's pretty freaking important because like getting low on a bike is like my job. And I just did this thing and I was like, dude, I'm perfect. I'm the best. And Alex is like, look at this. And I was not low. I was low enough. Low enough. Just low enough. But not as low as we need to be. You didn't have any luxury low. I want to get some luxury low. I never know how to measure a drop. About this big. But then by the time you land, it's like what? Coming up on five feet. It's the same technique as the small one. The only like differences would be that the landing is steeper. So it's more important that you get extra low so you can make more angles. Coming in. He's got some speed in the position. Perfect. We are pushing the bars forward to match the angle of the bike to the landing. You have to do that. If you do nothing and get stiff, you'll go over the bars. One thing I want for all you people out there is to reach the point where like on the ground or in the air is seamless. You don't even notice. Most people, as soon as you get in the air, their personality changes. Like they freak out. They lose their mind, right? Yeah. But the mechanics are always the same. We're not going to do this one. Why? Because it kicks up at the end. You see it's not flat like the other one. Yeah. And because it kicks up, it's actually a little bit of jump mechanics. So we'll do it, but we'll do it in a different video. Rob and I hope this helps. If you like this video, hit the like button. If you want to see more, hit the... Subscribe? That's it. And we'll see you next time on Joy of Bike. Peace.