How To Jump A Hardtail Mountain Bike.

Welcome back, you beautiful people, and welcome to my hardtail jump masterclass, where I'm going to help build your confidence when jumping your hardtail. Let's get started. You can learn to jump on any bike. The techniques can be translated over to any bike and wheel size, but it all depends on the bike, and bike setup can make it harder or easier to learn to jump. Now, the hardtail is the best platform to learn the jumping techniques. Before we jump into it, excuse the pun, what pedal platform is easiest to learn on? Well, I recommend flats, because it gives you the ability to move your foot around and easy to get off the bike if it were to go wrong. With the clips, you can be super reliant on getting the bike up in the air by yanking on your clips to bring the bike up, which is bad technique. Flat pedals is a great place and platform to start. Confidence comes with time, and time spent riding your bike builds your confidence, so more time on the saddle is definitely going to build your confidence. But right, let's start with a little recap on the bunny hop. Quick recap on the bunny hop. There are three movements, pop, pull, and push. These three actions are the same when it comes to jumping, but you're using the takeoff to assist you into the air. Right, your first step starts all the way back here before you get to the kicker. Now, it's called the pop, which is the jumping technique. So what you want to do before you get there is you want to preload, and basically you're lowering your body into the bike. You're going to be driving your bike up the lip. As soon as your wheel starts to let off up the top of the takeoff, this is where you want to stand up high and tall. You're pulling up, not saying pull on the bars. You're going to just drive the bike up, preload, and you're going to explode the bike up into the air by standing up tall. As soon as your bike wheel comes off the ground like this, it comes to step two. The quicker you explode up the lip, the higher you're going to get into the air, but that all comes with time. Now, step two is all about bringing that rear wheel up into the air, and by doing this, you're going to be curling your feet on the pedals to manipulate the bike to come up into your body, up into your hips. Use your feet on your pedals to bring the bike up. Don't pull up, because that's when you have the tendency to bring your feet off the pedals, which I'll touch on in a second. So you're curling your feet on the pedals, bringing the bike up into you. So you're bringing that back wheel up to level out with your front. So the more you exaggerate by bringing the bike up into you off the back wheel from the takeoff, that means you're going to explode more into the air. Again, that comes with time and technique with practice. Now, if you find that your feet are coming off the pedals, it's all down to the wrong technique, and that means you're pulling up. You're not curling your feet on the pedals. You're basically just lifting up your bike like this. Now, especially when you've come off from your clipless pedals to your flats, you're going to find yourself lifting like this, which is bad technique. That's why I say riding flat pedals when it comes to learning to jump is the best technique and best platform to learn it. Right, step number three. Right, you've popped, you've pulled, now you're pushing. We're pushing on to step three. Pushing means you're basically going to level out the bike. You curled your feet on the pedals. You're bringing the back wheel up to match the front, and this is where you're going to push the bike forward. Now, by doing this, you want to have a nice, low saddle. That means you can get the bike up and nice into you by having a high saddle. It's got a tendency to push your body weight over the front because your saddle's going to hit you in the bum, and you're going to go nose heavy, which I'll touch on a few problems in a second. Now, you've leveled out onto step three. You want to match your front wheel into the landing. So, you want to land nicely with your front wheel followed by your rear. You don't want to land back wheel first because that's a tendency to loop out if you're not covering the rear brake, or you just end up going over the bars, which, like I said, I'll touch on the problems in a second. The last thing with this, and it's actually quite hard if you're starting to learn, is just relax. As soon as you tense up right at the start, it'll all go wrong. You'll tend to pull with your strongest, most dominant arm, which would be your left or your right, which will send you sideways, or you end up dead-sailoring in the air and going all skew-whiff. You just want to relax when jumping. Let the technique, be confident with your technique, get into the air, relax, land. Land with a slightly bent knee. You want to come in, knee's not straight, you want to come in with a slightly bent knee, absorb your whole impact just to make the landing a lot smoother because on a hardtail, you haven't got any rear suspension. Right, before we end the video, common mistakes when learning to jump your hardtail, or any bike for that matter. First one is yanking on the bars. You're pulling on the bars, thinking the more you pull, the higher you're going to get. No, this will have a tendency for you to be going over the bars because it just ends in tears, or going sideways, or going, landing, anyway, it's bad. Don't pull on the bars. Solution is, you don't want to be relying on pulling with your legs. You want to curl your feet on your bike. You want to bring your bike up with your hips, and it's all about technique. The kicker is going to get you into there, but don't just rely on the kicker because you need the technique to help you get into the air. So those three steps, if you take those on board, will help you get your bike into the air. This one is getting bucked, going over the bars. It's not a nice feeling, it's horrible. It's like the point of no return. The solution to this is basically, your technique has gone wrong right there. You basically sat right back over the back wheel, you compressed, you pinged over the bars, your body weight's going over. Now the solution is basically getting your ballast all the way back over the back wheel. Get your butt and just stretch out like this, just to keep the weight over the back and not over the front. Hopefully that saves your bacon. If not, well then it's a point of no return, and I've been there, and it's not a nice feeling. So go back to your technique and start learning it a little bit better and a little bit safer. Or send in your fails and bails. We'll put it on the show because, whoo, we've seen a few. This last one, number three, is the dead sailor, is when your front wheel's really high and your back wheel's too low. That means you haven't brought the back wheel to match the front, and you're all stiff. Like I said, you're stiffened up. You want to relax, you want to keep your arms in front of you, you want to keep your legs bent, and in that attack position. So there we have it, a few simple tips on how to gain confidence and how to learn how to jump your hardtail out there on the trail. It's all about the pop, the pull, the push, and relax. But it comes with practice, and practice comes with having a lot more fun on your bike and just riding it, learning these techniques. Hopefully this video's helped you out. If you want to learn other techniques, we've done a plethora of other videos on how to do cornering, riding routes, how to ride rough stuff, it's all on our channel. Give us a thumbs up like, and I'll see you next time. See ya, cup of tea, cup of tea. There's some more jumps down here. Don't forget that saddle.