OVER 40 MOUNTAIN BIKE TIPS- CORNERING WITH CONFIDENCE - Loose over Hardpack!

Hey YouTube, welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to be with Lee from Lee Likes Bikes again and we're going to talk about cornering. The big news in cornering is traction isn't something that you inherit from the bike and the tire and the trail. Traction is something you make. Yes. What we'll focus on in this video is the idea of loading turns. We'll show you some ways where you can actively load the bike and basically if you make the bike twice as heavy you've doubled your traction and if you double your traction you quadruple your confidence. There's nothing that will give you more confidence than the ability to literally change the dynamics of what's happening. Anytime we feel like we're like there's a mystery our confidence goes down. So I want you guys to know the heavier I press my bike into the ground the more traction I have the safer I am. Period. And this is something to practice, practice, practice. We're going to pick out some corners and we're going to get started. All right let's go. We're all over 40 here and we don't wake up very limber. In order to corner we need to carry our shoulders very very close to the handlebars. That gives us range of motion with our arms. Best way to get your shoulders low is with a hinge. In a hinge our knees stay over our feet and our butts go back and our torsos fold to level. You have an enormous amount of power for pumping corners and also it brings your shoulders close to the bar so you have all your range of motion. If you don't have a hinge you can't corner. Before you go out and practice do some exercises like here's a good one. Get as low as you can and then just try to like stand up so just go down, up, down, up and your hamstrings will gradually loosen. Ideally you can be in a hinge with your legs straight and then once you have this range of motion you can rip corners. When we teach cornering we always start with the basics just to make sure that people have them. Step one is we will enter our cornering point in a deep hinge. We'll put our right foot down ahead of time and we're going to focus on leaning the bike. Check this out. You have all your weight on the outside foot for right now. Hands are completely neutral. When you lean your bike look at what the bars do automatically. They turn don't they? So if you just let the bike roll look what it does. It makes a mathematically perfect circle and so anything you do with your arms screws it up. Yes the absolute basics. Come in low, down, lean the bike. Foot down, look, lean the bike. Notice how the bike is leaning and I'm not. Cornering 101. If you're balanced in the middle of the bike your hands are neutral and you lean the bike it will turn beautifully. Okay I don't even like that kind of cornering. When I'm cornering like that with the foot down it's too passive. I like to put my feet into it more but you did it so beautifully that I'm sitting here watching and going oh I want to do that. My question is like in your outside foot did you apply any pressure? I just put my foot down passively and I made a nice lean but the next thing we're going to do is we're going to load the foot intentionally and you're going to hear a difference. Instead of putting the foot down ahead of time you're going to notice this time I'm going to enter the turn with my feet level. While I lean the bike I progressively increase the pressure so this is really cool for confidence. Anytime the bike is leaning you need traction. Every time the bike is leaning we make traction period and you rep this so many freaking times that it's subconscious and you don't even know you're doing it. I'm about to do it. Let's see one. Oh I saw a little hop. You're hopping out of the corner. What's up with the hop? I'm making my bike extremely heavy in the corner. What happens to anything after it's very very heavy? It's light. It gets light. Everything we do is a wave of love and cornering is a wave that happens to be sideways. So you'll see among good riders a slight unweight, a heavy load, and then another unweight. I was looking at that and your hips are way out. So as far as hips go you're in a hinge and your belly button your center of mass is right over the bottom bracket. When we corner your belly button will stay basically on top of the bottom bracket. Your torso will rotate on around that point. So you stay balanced. A lot of people make this mistake of just taking their body and putting it outside the bike to move their hips. No negative. Like stay balanced and just rotate the body. I imagine there's this arrow of shred and I need to point it wherever I want to go. That does all the hip stuff for me. Maybe it's helpful. So when Alex turns his head his whole body goes right? But most people don't. Instead of an arrow of awesomeness coming out of your sternum have it come out of your hips. Wait. Yeah okay I'm not saying all that but that's. Whatever parts you got down there. Whatever you got. Whatever you got. Point them parts where you want to go. Yeah. Oh yeah. Lean the bike, load the foot, redirect the hips. Like that's good cornering. There's a continuum. On one end of the continuum your foot is all the way down. In general when your foot's all the way down you don't have a ton of pumping power because it's just one leg. But you have a lot of edge bite. So for most most of us if you feel like the turn is sketchy and you need edge bite then put the foot down. And that's a good way to start. Now on the other end of the continuum your feet are level. And when your feet are level you have less edge bite but you potentially have way more pumping power. Now we're going to get into cornering with our feet level. And what you'll see is I have more range of motion and more power. So I'll be able to load heavier and the bike is likely to make more noise. Oh I meant to do feet up and I didn't. You did kind of half and half. Turn. Yep oh there it is. You were trying for level feet but your feet were at kind of an angle. Yeah. And that's completely rad because right it's a compromise of pump and edge. I'm kind of stoked about it because I was watching Bruni. Super Bruni. They do that. And he does a ton of it. It makes sense because you're like I'm going to pump this corner but then it is a flat corner. So it's completely reasonable that your body will do the compromise. And you see that in a lot of good riders. There's like that that 45 degree crank angle. That's a little pump and a little edge both. The cool thing about the 45.2 is you know you're turning but you're probably about to hit some rocks or some other section super quick to get to flat pedals. For like long flat turns we're going to break them into pieces and so the route of the bike isn't just a simple arc anymore. I call it scalloping because it's like a scallop show. That's one of the most useful drills a mountain biker can do. Make a significant left turn and that's where I'm pumping and creating drive and then I make a small right turn to reset and then another left turn and then a right turn and a left turn and a right turn. The bars are doing like a kayak stroke. There it is. Very nice. And so what's really neat about this while you're redirecting the bike is profoundly heavy and the tires are biting into the ground and you don't drift. You don't slide out. You don't. And then you come light and when you reset the bike is weightless. And guess what? You don't slide when you're off the ground either. It's impossible. One of the things that I really like about that is that you're taking the trail as a suggestion. It's not a mandate. Yeah. We turn when we want to turn. Dude. As you gain confidence you decide where you're going to turn. The sheep all take the same line. You're a wolf. I like that roller way over there. I'm going to smash it or I'm going to pump that corner and like riding with intention and making things happen on purpose to create joy. Like that's a whole different way of riding a bicycle. It's probably a good way to live your life honestly. Exactly. That is one of the absolute cornerstone drills because it's cornering and pumping integrated. So if you can do that you can shred. That's all there is to it. Loose over hard pack is one of the sketchiest surfaces you can corner on. So we're going to use that pumping technique that we just did in the cul-de-sac here. I'm going to punch very heavily into the ground and then I'll come light and I'll redirect again. I'll take a few pieces out of this turn. This is the acid test because there is no traction here. This is really loose man. Yeah. But like if you're if you're putting 500 pounds into the tire it's not going to drift dude. I decided which corner. I didn't even need to put more than one. I was already turned. Yeah so Alex just did like a longer phase which seemed to work really really well. Which was really just one one and a half scallops. Yeah. Which are delicious. They are delicious and they're nutritious too. The less confident you are the more small bites you'll take and the more confident you are in the situation the fewer longer bites you'll take. The next drill is a slalom drill and it teaches you how to transition between left and right. The idea being of course that you're very heavy when you're turning, very light while you're transitioning. It's like skiing. You're teaching yourself how to get heavy and create traction. You're teaching yourself how to transition and you're also going faster. Like this is a complete win this technique. This is a cool like kind of microcosm for good single track right here. So like that side light side rhythm that's at the the heart of shredding. The heavier you get into the bike the more traction you have and it's kind of rad because like I thought this was perfect traction when I did it but now that we look at it it's not perfect at all. It's really sketchy loose of a hard pack right but this is something I want for all you guys out there is to understand that the the looser the turn is the more aggressive you need to be to make it work. Not more passive more aggressive. If you like this video carve an exquisite turn on that like button and if you'd like to see more shroud the subscribe button. We'll see you next time. Enjoy your bike. Namaste.