How To Ride Drop-Offs On Your Mountain Bike | Beginner MTB Skills

If you want to ride drops like this one, well, sometimes you've got to start on drops like this one. Today, we're going to look from how to go from beginner drops to intermediate drops. Before we get cracking, why not like and subscribe the channel? Get daily doses of awesomeness in the mountain bike world from us here, but let's crack on. First up, let's talk about speed because you need to be going fast enough off of a drop regardless of its size that you carry enough momentum so that both wheels go off the drop at the same time, if you like. If you're going too slow, one's going to go off. Then if you're not carrying the pace, the front end is going to drop. Depending upon the size of the drop, you're either going to go over the bars, which is really something you definitely don't want to happen, or you're going to hit a chain ring. You can see what's all these marks here. Now, if the drop is small enough like this one, you can get away with that because it means the front's got time to drop below your body and you are going to crash, but either way, it is not something you want to happen. However, the tricky thing with speed is not all drops are the same, so not all speeds are the same. This is the hard part to learn and figure out. It's unfortunately a bit trial and error. Now, when you come up to a drop, you'll know whether or not you've got the speed to actually go off of it and we'll call it clear it, make it off with both wheels in the air, or if you are going to sink that front end down if you like, because there'll just be an instinctive feeling that actually, uh-oh, I'm not going to actually properly make it off here. That motion that when you pick the front wheel up, you'll come up to the end of the drop, you'll pick the front wheel up and you'll know, and you could be learning the hard way here, people, I'm going to warn you now that if you haven't got the speed, that front's going to drop. If you have got the speed, you're going to sail off. Start small as we're on here and work your way up because the consequences are a lot lower. That is my top tip right here when it does come to speed. That's our speed sorted then, but what about our body position on the run-up? Where should we be on our bike? Where should it be and how should it be? Well, on the run-up to a drop, you're going to be in a fairly attack aggressive position. You're going to be central on the bike, body, butt over the saddle if you like. You're going to have a slight bend in the arms and legs. Heels are going to be dropped so that those feet are nice and planted and forced into the pedals. Head on, eyes up, looking forward, looking at the drop, what's coming up, and you're going to be covering the brakes as well just in case to cover any eventualities. First of all, find yourself just a nice big open area. Sloping downhill is preferable if you like because it helps you just carry a little bit of speed, but a really good way of practicing is actually even if just finding a small curb to go off. Essentially, what you want to be doing is going from that body position that we had in the previous segments, that central position. What we're going to do is we're going to squat into the bike, so we're going to come down and back in an L-shape with our heels dropped. Then as we come down, we'll shift our weight back, we'll push the bike out in front of us ever so slightly to help lift the front end up, and you should sail off a drop. It should be down, back, up. There you go. You can see that lifted the front end up. Now, this is one of those processes that is an easier said than done kind of thing. It does take a fair few things to have a go at, but a couple of things to note is cover the back brake because if you start getting too vigorous and to loop out of that, covering the back brake or just dabbing or pulling it is going to drop the front wheel down. Remember, you're just going to have to do this a lot of times. Repetition is what gets this range of movements linking together nice and smoothly. Absolutely perfect. If you don't have a drop to practice this on, well, then a great thing to do is just put a marker on the floor if you want and try and make sure you do that pickup, that little manual before you or as your front wheel gets to that marker on the floor because that'll simulate that line of where you're about to drop off. I think you all out there got it pretty dialed in. Let's try it. Off the drops. Now, we're airborne. We're off the drop. We're in the air. What do we do? Well, it's time to spot the landing. We're going to loop in a few things that we did earlier. That looking ahead, that eyes up, head up, spotting our drop, then transfers to later on in the process. Once we're pulled up, we're going off the drop, we're then spotting our landing. Now, on a drop fairly straightforward like this, it's a nice, fairly open, easy landing. There's not too many obstacles. There's not a big downslope we need to match into. We spotted our landing. As we've come off the drop, we've obviously extended our arms and legs. As we come off, what we then do is we bring ourselves, we pull ourselves back into the middle of the bike. You'll notice that your arms and legs are slightly extended. Upon landing, you're looking, you absorb the impact with your arms, you absorb the impact with your legs. Obviously, the bike absorbs it as well depending upon what you're on. Pedals always want to stay nice and level. Remember, that dropper should be down as well. If you've got a dropper, you don't want it up there for going off drops. You want to drop that dropper for drops because it just makes sense to drop the dropper. Then we're looking ahead and we're going to plan for the rest of the trail and hopefully ride off smoothly into the sunset. Congratulations, you bunch of superstars. You have crushed simple drops. What do you do and how does it change when it comes to something like this, more advanced drops? Well, here's what. More advanced drops, first up, could require more or less speed depending upon the size of them or whether there's a gap to clear or a landing to make. We'll use this again as our example. This drop here actually doesn't drop any more than the previous one we were on. However, because it fades away this landing, there's a downslope if you like. Depending upon the speed you go off it, you could either drop one foot or four foot or six foot down the bottom. Actually, the landing of it, we hadn't really dealt before with a sloped landing. This changes what we need to do in the air. We need to essentially start to shift our body weight forwards rather than keeping it central because we need to tilt the bike in the air. We need that bike to match the landing. The bikes or the wheel if you like, the two wheels are going to match the angle of the landing so you get a nice smooth transition down. More technical drops, well, they also generally tend to be, well, not quite so straightforward. This drop here does have a nice fairly simple run-in. However, the run-out is a lot rougher. It's what? We got this cutout or dugout area here where people have been skidding and it's eroded away, but also we're straight into a feature. We're into a corner and another drop straight after. It's left-hander. In the air, we got to be thinking, well, beforehand, you're almost thinking about the drop, but then you're preempting the landing and the corner after. The speed is going to change for the corner unless you can rail it flat out. All these things add up to the complexities of hitting slightly more technical drops and all require a little bit more of a thought process. Lastly, then, obviously, the weather conditions will play a generally much larger effect on a more technical drop. For example, this one that we've got here has got a big rock slab of a takeoff. If it was wet, that could be really slippery. If we were in the woods and you've got a load of roots before a drop, well, that makes things very tricky as well because you've got your body weight is going to be shifting here, there, and everywhere. You've obviously got to gauge your speed for it and also take into account the slipperiness. Then once we've taken off, we're landing, we can see down here that this is all washed out. Look how loose this is. We're not landing and just going in a dead straight line. We're turning on all this loose, washed-out gravel. We got to take the corner into consideration. Then have we got the speed for the drop after it? These are all things that you're going to learn over time. They do take a bit of trial and error and then maybe a bit of blood along the way. There might be the odd crash or two. I hope not. I hope you absolutely smash it first time round. You're going to have to let me know in the comments down below. Please do. I always like to hear from what you guys and girls are up to out there, how you're getting on with your riding. Drop us a comment. Hopefully, the video was super-duper helpful. A like and a subscribe go a long way to supporting the channel as well. For me, for now, I'll see you later.