DROPS in 3 Easy Steps! | Beginner MTB Sessions with Bryan

What's up guys and welcome back to beginner mountain bike skills with Brian. If you haven't tuned in to any of the other videos, Brian is only a couple months into mountain biking. He has his first full suspension mountain bike and we're teaching him the basic skills he needs to go out there and have a safe, fun time. Fun time! In this video we're going to be focusing on drops. So in front of us you'll see we have about a one foot drop which is where we're going to start with Brian. I'm going to show you some of the basic issues that I see with most beginner riders and then a few pointers to improve on your drops and just make them a little safer and more fun and allow you to move to bigger and bigger drops. So let's jump right into it. I need to be out here with these bugs. I need my latte. Are you ready? Yeah. Alright guys, so there are two ways that I always see beginners hit drops. The first way is that they don't transfer their weight over the back wheel and they just let the wheel fall off the drop which is really dangerous. The issue with not transferring your weight back and just letting your wheel fall is that obviously pushes your body weight forward. When you just let your front wheel fall off it bucks your body forward and you have more of a tendency to flip over the bars and crash. The other way is that they overdo it and they actually try to bunny hop off the drop. When you bunny hop off a drop you're basically disconnecting with the bike. When you bunny hop you're extending your body. It's really hard to stay in that attack position. A drop isn't necessarily a jump. You just want to roll off it in a stable position and again let the bike do the work. So let's focus on the proper way to do this. Let's let the bike do the work. I'll give you some tips and tricks. Alright Brian, let's see it. Now what you notice about Brian when he came off that is he didn't land stable. His original idea off of a drop like most people is to kind of bunny hop. It feels like the safe option but it's not. The basic idea with any drop is again to let the bike do the work. You first want to make sure you're in that attack mode so you have your arm and leg, your own personal suspension in addition to the bike. Hold on a second this bug is in attack mode right now bro. This thing's gonna bite me. It's trying to eat my brain. Alright roll. The next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you transfer your butt over the back of the bike much like a roller and similar to like we learned in the manual video. By transferring your weight back over the bike you allow the front wheel to stay elevated and smooth off the drop. So basically your goal is to shift your weight back and let your front wheel be unweighted and simply roll off your back wheel catches up and you fall off the drop nice and smooth. Now with this one you'll see that there's a little bit of a lip here and that's where if you haven't checked out the manual video make sure you do. You want to make sure that you use that to give you a little bit more lip and just roll off. By keeping your weight transferred back over the bike no matter what's here or what's here your bike is going to be able to handle it. So you keep your weight back keep your weight balanced and the bike will just roll over whatever it needs to. Alright so now that we've taught Brian some skills he's going to try this the way we taught him. Keep that butt back let the bike do the work. Very nice man! So as you can see when Brian went off the drop he let the bike do the work. He unweighted his front tire let the bike roll over the drop which keeps the bike level. He stayed in that attack position and that allowed him to stay nice and smooth off of the roller. Nice man! No skidding! The last thing to remember on any drop is that momentum is your friend. The slower you go over the drop the more you're going to have to manual off to keep that front wheel up. You don't want to go too slow you want to have a nice even speed which allows the momentum of the bike again to keep that front weight elevated you drop down nice and even. Let's see what it looks like. Now remember attack mode, momentum, keep your butt back. Very good! Awesome! Nice work man! Alright guys so now that Brian has mastered a couple smaller drops we're going to move them up to the big leagues. The drop you see in front of me is about three feet tall. It's a very simple drop. It's built out of a couple pallets here. That's a relatively smooth landing so it's not straight to flat. It's nothing too crazy. It's nice and smooth on the roll out. It's a good place for Brian to practice his skills and move to the next level. Now remember these are the keys when you're doing a drop especially when you're moving up a level. Momentum is your friend. Never roll into a drop super slow. Your front wheel is just going to fall off. Remember to stay in that attack mode. You want to make sure that you have your arms and legs as suspension. So you have suspension on your bike but your arms are also going to help you absorb the shock of the drop. The biggest key is keeping your weight shifted down and back. You want to make sure we're not trying to lift our front wheel necessarily but you want your front wheel to be weightless so that when you roll off your front wheel stays at the same height and then your tires will land at the same time. So we're gonna have Brian try this a couple times. He has his proper helmet on, some nice gloves to keep him safe. I think he'll be just fine so let's give it a shot. Ready when you are princess. Nice! So that was good. The one thing I will note is when you're a little nervous, I'm sure you were a little nervous off that. Wicked nervous. Yeah so when you're nervous you can tell that Brian pulled up on his front wheel a little more and landed on his back tire. It's not a bad thing. It's definitely a safety mechanism and you can still land just fine that way but this time I want Brian to focus on not really pulling that tire just shifting his weight back and making it weightless. Got that? Got it. I was a little concerned about the speed. Nice! That was great man. Give me a woo. Woo! Nice! Like sliced bread baby. Feeling good? More confident? Good yeah. Momentum is good right? 100% You gotta go. If you don't go then you don't go. Another progression in doing drops and again this will take some time but this is actually it's kind of a jump but it's more of a drop with a small gap in it. So it's a little bigger it's probably a three four foot gap. It looks really big. It's intimidating but again if you have the basics down if you keep your weight back keep your momentum and let the bike do the work you'll see how smooth it looks for me. It looks easy because it is but it takes time to get there. You got to get comfortable with doing all of your smaller drops. If I crash on this or if I don't make it to the landing I'm gonna crash a little bit harder. Bigger risk gonna make you nervous but ultimately you can get to this level pretty easily. And remember guys ride at your own level. You don't want to do anything that you're not ready for. This drop isn't going anywhere. You can always come back so ride at your level and remember that hesitation is a mountain biker's worst enemy. With something like this if you hesitate it's going to be much more dangerous than if you just commit. If you're ever going to try something that's bigger like this you have to commit. Don't hesitate. If you're going to do it just go for it. Otherwise that's when it gets dangerous. All right guys so that wraps it up on our beginner session with Brian on how to do drops. I hope this video is helpful for you guys. Make sure you check out the other videos in the series. Make sure you like, comment, and subscribe to follow along for more. Keep riding guys.