EASIEST WAY TO BUNNY HOP - It is never too late!

Hey YouTube, welcome back to the channel. We have a beautiful day here in Boulder, Colorado. We're outside and we're going to do something on bunny hops. First, I want to shout out to our Joy of Bike crew that's in the Philippines. We've got people watching from all over the world. Thank you. We've got the best subscribers. Now, you may or may not be able to bunny hop, but I bet you'd like to know how to bunny hop better. And I guarantee you, you've got friends that don't know how to bunny hop. Share this video with them because we are joined again by Lee from Lee Likes Bikes, who has taught more people to bunny hop probably than anybody else in the world. And that's not hyperbole, that's just fact. He's got a way of doing it. I just was messing with it here and it's so much easier than the way I bunny hop. He claims, and I believe him, he's never failed to teach somebody to bunny hop. Today, I am going to try to teach Alex a new way of bunny hopping. He has been bunny hopping in an old-fashioned way that I used to teach, but now I think I know better and I want to teach him this new way. If you've been on YouTube looking at bunny hop videos, there's a lot of good riders showing how to bunny hop, but teaching it is always different than doing it. And I'm so glad we've got Lee for that. And we're gonna bunny hop all the bikes because people are always asking, does this work on a hardtail? Does this work on a BMX? Does this work on a mountain bike? Does this work on full suspension? I'm okay at hops. I'm not some bunny hop expert. An okay hop is pretty much all you need. You don't need a great hop for 99% of what you encounter. You just need an okay hop. Today's about a functional hop, right? Most of the time when we're hopping on trails, they're not these huge high trajectory hops. They're high speed, low trajectory hops. If you can get a reliable, repeatable, balanced six or eight inch hop, that's gonna massively change your life because a root becomes a roller. A square rock becomes a roller. Everything becomes pumpable. So I want to encourage you guys to start with a nice, let's say six to 12 inch repeatable hop. Those days where I just feel on it, it's because I'm not on the ground. I just keep hopping and I'm turning every obstacle into a little downside and I'm getting a little bit more pump out of the trail. I call it being sprightly. From the wood sprite, I guess I really would like to be a wood sprite someday. Not sure why we're talking about that. The bunny hop's been around since the turn of the century, by the way. Found some really old footage. Cut to old footage now. There was a dance in the 50s called the bunny hop. This may be where the name comes from. I kind of think we found the soundtrack for this video. Sorry. Complexity is the enemy of execution. If you make something twice as complicated, you make it roughly 10 zillion times harder to learn. The advice out there on how to bunny hop is too complicated. And some of it is just, frankly, BS. I've been at this for going on 20 years. Some of the wrongs I'm about to describe, I used to think were right and I used to teach. So I'm just going to come out and say that. The first one is this idea, and you're going to see it everywhere on the internet, this idea that you have to rock back into a manual and then pop off the rear wheel. Wrong. You're in a technical situation, say, trying to go over a log, and you've just on purpose leaned your body back. If you hit that log with your body way back like that, what happens to you? Boom, over the bar as you go. This thing where you're always messing with your balance back and forth in random ways in technical situations is frankly dangerous. And there are places to use it, but not now. So while you're learning, do not rock back into a manual. Stay middle. Okay, reaction to rocking back. I rock back. I've always rocked back. I didn't even think it was possible not to rock back. Two minutes ago, Lee said, hey, why don't you try it from the center of the bike? I bunny hopped from the center of the bike without rocking back. The same height. Same height. It will show it. I was shocked that I was able to do it. I honestly thought it would be impossible. Second, there's this idea that you're supposed to scoop the pedals up with your feet. That's erroneous at best. A, weak muscles. B, it's not necessary. The scoop. Here's what's happening. People are looking at pictures of them doing bunny hops and your toes point as you extend. So as you extend your legs, it's a natural thing. Try to jump without pushing your toes down. It's just what happens. Then they push with the bars and the back of the bike comes up. It's the push that's bringing the bike up. And I will prove it right now. I'm not going to scoop with my feet. What the hell? I mean, it ain't the scoop. Another biggie, the way you get the bike to arc forward in the air is by twisting your wrists. Come on. Like you're going to move this bicycle with these muscles. That's insane. The fourth one, and I've made this mistake myself, is this idea that clip-in pedals are bad. You can learn to hop improperly on clip-in pedals, but there's nothing inherently wrong with clip-in pedals. We can learn how to hop well with any kind of pedal. If you want to be the most skilled rider that you can be, then you're going to want to ride on flats. If you want to be the fastest rider you can be, you're going to want to ride clipped in. One of the many things that's made bunny hopping too complicated, there are these two kinds of hops that are considered very different. There's the English or European hop. The bike stays pretty flat. There's also the American bunny hop, also known sometimes as a J-hop, where the bike follows a trajectory that's more like a porpoise. And then they're considered different techniques. Around here, we favor the international standard, which we will now call, are you ready? A hop. Until you guys come up with a better name. No, no more new names. Can we stick with hop? Because it's just baloney. It's baloney. And people use it to be like an expert on this hop and that hop. What if we call it a joy of bike, Lee McCormack? No. No? No. Yeah, let's just call it a hop. Whatever you call it, every solid hop consists of two movements. And if you've been watching the channel, you've heard these terms before. There's a row and an anti-row. In a row, you're pushing with your feet and pulling with your hands. That brings the bike up. When you anti-row, you are pushing with your hands and pulling with your feet. All hops exist on a continuum. If you have a flat trajectory hop, that's mostly leg power. That's where the vertical comes from. With just enough arm power to keep the bike level. A much higher, steeper, like vertical type of a hop, then you're going to use a lot of leg power and also a lot of arm power. But this is critical, okay? We never push with our feet without also anchoring back with our hands. It doesn't work. It's a closed loop. If you want a flat trajectory, like if you're going really fast and you want to skip over some roots, then it's mostly leg with a little bit of hand. If you come around a corner and you're going slow and you have to get up like a two foot ledge, that's a lot of leg and more hand. But again, you're always executing the same exact movement pattern. For hopping, pumping, jumping, technical climbing, wheelie dropping, it's all the same move over and over again. Your body is designed around just a few archetypal movements. These movements, they are deeply honed and everybody has them. I see this in my classes every day. Take someone who doesn't really know how to ride and you teach them these movements and everything clicks because it's in your DNA. That's old school technique. And a lot of people would tell you that's perfect. That's a very metabolically expensive, potentially dangerous and inefficient way to hop. I'm going to learn how to hop the Lee Likes Bikes way. Your feet are basically in the middle of the bike, right? Yeah. But just a little bit toward the back. Yeah. So when you're, when you're on your bike, let's say roughly 60% of your weight's on the back tire and roughly 40% of your weight's on the front tire. Okay. All you have to do, have to do to get the bike in the air is load and unload your feet. If you do that, the bike will unload. I'm not sure what to do with my hands. It'd be good just to hold them down by your side. Yeah. Right now, just for fun. Don't use your hands. What you guys will see is the rear tire will come up higher. That's it right there. Perfect. That's it. Since the feet are closer to the rear wheel, when Alex only pushes into the feet, the rear wheel gets heavier, which makes it lighter, which makes it go higher. So that's all you have to do to get your bike off the ground. And honestly, if you're going fast and you have to like skip over a rut or something, low trajectory, that's all you really have to do. I would say that was not even a Euro hop. That was an Australian hop. I just made that up. Nobody repeat that ever. So now Alex will do a low trajectory hop. So he's going to do exactly what he did with his feet before. And at the same time, so simple. Are you ready? He's just going to anchor back with his hands just a little bit. And what that's going to do is it's going to lever the bike into the ground like this. And then depending on how hard he pulls with his hands, that bike will come up or ultimately it'll do one of these numbers. Guys like Alex, who have been doing this kind of hop forever, by the way, forgive me. You bought my first book. That's what I taught you to do. So time to undo that. Like it's going to take some focus, especially you can see it on Alex. Like just be in the middle. There it is. Yeah, that was clean. And I want you guys to observe. If you can see like, as he starts to do this from a more balanced place, you're going to see less effort in general. Those are like that. Really? That was that high? Those felt this high. Just so you know. Oh no, you're getting proper hops. Really? Oh yeah. Okay. Shocking. Right? Because they feel so chill. And I didn't think it was possible to hop from the middle of the bike like that. That's all there is to it. Just take that motion. Take it outside right now. Go outside right now. Take the video with you on your phone and just start practicing. It's just that little motion down with your feet, back on the bars, and then push forward. You're going to have a little hop. Remember that you're pulling back on the bars. You're not pulling up on the bars. That's where most people go wrong. One of the things that gets us in trouble on the bike and in life too, is this idea that big awesome things have to be hard. When you do this cleanly, it's easy. If you don't feel like you have the strength, I was using no strength. My hands were so loose on the bars. You're just barely anchoring back. Yeah. That's all it takes to get a higher trajectory hop. Then you're going to give more arm pull. And that's going to lever the bike more vertically. So in that case, you are going to use more upper body strength. Do you want to try some of that? Yeah. There's a lever from your bottom bracket to your grips. And there's a lever from your bottom bracket to your rear hub. The leverage ratio of a trail bike is something around 1.8. The leverage ratio of a dirt jump bike with shorter stays is right around 2.0. The leverage ratio for a BMX bike is about 2.5. The higher the leverage ratio is, the more power you're putting into the rear wheel, which translates into higher, easier hops. It really helps to jump over something. You could use anything, as long as it's something that crushes. Cardboard box is great. We've got a candidate here. The best thing about it is if you miss, you just smash it. So we're going to smash this one. Maybe we'll go over it once and then we'll smash it. The more you do this, the more proficient you're going to be. I love stuff where you just need a bike and just a slab of asphalt and you're having fun. Bunny hops are definitely that. I've been going from bike to bike, from BMX bike to hardtail to full suspension, and there's been no difference. I'm sort of surprised. I don't have to adjust my technique. Between the BMX and the other bigger bikes, there's a little bit of an adjustment. Between the hardtail and the suspension bike, there's like zero adjustment. So often I get questions, can you do this on a hardtail? Can you do it on a suspension bike? I'm a little shocked. Very close, if not identical, in terms of what I'm doing. I hope you liked this video. If you did, hit the like button. If you'd like to see more, hit the subscribe button. And if you've got ideas for videos we should be doing that we're not thinking of, put them in the comments below. We're always looking for ideas, and we'll see you next time on Joy of Biking.