How To Ride Any Drop Off On Your MTB | Mountain Bike Skills

Drop-offs are some of the most common fails we see sent into the uploader. Ones like this, this, oh my God, and this one. It's because of this, today I'm going to be teaching you how to ride any drop-off. We've got smaller drops, we've got bigger drops. I'm going to get you conquering all the drops. The beauty of practicing drops is it's the same basic skill, whether you're going off of a curb, something like this, or something like this. There are even bigger drops again. Think Red Bull Rampage, those are massive. If you're new to mountain biking or you're looking to upgrade your drop skills, if you like, it's worth starting off small and working your way up. To begin with then, there's a couple of don'ts for riding drop-offs, regardless of it's the smaller or the bigger. It's don't be looking straight down. That's especially true when you're on the running. Whether you're up here or down here, if you're just looking down at your front wheel, you're not going to be able to spot your landing and prepare for that. It's also going to throw some of your body weight further forward, lowering your chest. Rather than being up here, you're going to be down like this, which is going to put your weight where you don't want it to be. It means that spotting your landing, spotting what might be a loose, quite rocky landing like what we've got here, becomes even trickier. You want to eliminate these problems. The second one is braking. All of your braking should ideally always be done before the run into the drop, so up on the trail there. You want to avoid getting hard on the anchors anywhere on the run up to the drop. This long ladder style that drop that we're going to be doing today, you definitely don't want to be doing any hard braking on that to scrub your speed. What that's going to do is throw your body weight where you don't want it to be. It's going to make it trickier to be standing up on the pedals and shift that weight backwards. You want to be doing it on the run-in. You want to scrub it beforehand. Make sure you just have enough speed, obviously, to clear the drop that you're comfortable with, and it's going to eliminate another potential problem that could go wrong. There are a couple of ways to practice going off of a drop. You've got the classic weight slide, or you've got the proper manualing technique, if you like, both of which are very effective and both of which can be practiced on something far smaller to get your eye in and get the precision and the movements needed to then transfer it to something bigger. You can think of it in a couple of ways. You can drop your heels and shift your hips backwards, or you can be up in that ready position, push the bike out in front of you. Both techniques are going to get you the same end result. Either of these is going to allow hips and the body weight to come ever so slightly back over the rear end of the bike. It's also going to help in the front end not dropping. If you find the front end dropping a lot, you're going to need to perfect these techniques. The manual technique is a more advanced technique. It is harder to learn, but it can be learned in the same way in a much smaller, safer environment. If you're new to it, you can practice it again off of a curve or something. We have got loads of great videos teaching you exactly how to do that linked in the description down below. An advanced technique is squashing a drop. What do I mean by this? Well, squashing a drop is essentially minimizing the time between leaving the lip and contacting the landing, the ground, if you like. A lot of the time, you'll see racers do this, and it's when they're going a lot faster. If you go really fast off the same drop as when you go the correct pace, if you like, to make it nicer to the landing, you're going to land towards the bottom. Racers will often scrub, which is where you see them turn just as they're going off the lip slightly, or squash, which is where they actually compress their body into the bike. Arms and legs go down, their body comes down, and as they go off the end of the lip, as the back wheel leaves, they're pushing the bike down to get it to contact with the ground as quick as possible. A normal drop will look like this. Myself on the same drop, squashing it will look like this. How do we differentiate and tell how much speed we need for a drop this size compared to this size? Well, it's a bit of a dark art judging just how much speed is required for a drop, and it's something that comes with a lot of repetition and a lot of practice. When you start hitting drops, you'll gauge how much you need to, say, go one bike length, or two bikes high, or four foot high to six foot long. The more drops you do, the better you become at gauging speed. You'll generally know on the run-in whether you're going too slow to actually make any gap or any height, whether your even front wheel is going to have enough momentum to be able to be picked up so you don't just chain ring it off, which is never a good thing, especially if a drop becomes of a certain height. If you chain ring it off, you're going over the bars. My top tip here is going to be to just hit as many drops as you can. Build up that confidence of just being in the air, knowing the pace when coming into a drop, how long you'll be in the air for, how far forwards you'll travel, and how far down all at the same time. By just ticking off as many as you can, you are going to build up that muscle memory and memory of just what's required, and you'll be hitting drops left, right, and center, regardless of speed, before you know it. You've hit the drop. You're in the air. You're up here somewhere. Congratulations. I'm stoked you plucked up the courage. Now, we need to think about, well, in the air, what do we do to prepare for landing and the landing itself? Here's exactly what. As you go off the drop, obviously, naturally, your weight shifted slightly towards the back of the bike. When you're in the air, though, you'll notice that your weight then starts to naturally move forwards into the middle of the bike. This movement then causes the front end to drop ever so slightly, as you can see on screen now. By doing this, it should hopefully match up with the angle of the landing, but you can exaggerate this more or less to naturally mimic or match the angle of the landing if it's steeper or flatter. Time to prepare for landing. Here, you'll be using your arms and legs as additional suspension. Once you hit the ground, they're going to be absorbing the impact as well. Try and remain nice and strong. You'll be in the middle of the bike. Remember, head up, pedals level, looking where you want to be going, especially on the landing and then further on down the trail to carry on riding and enjoying your time. That's it. Hopefully, that's some top tips for you to conquer any drop out there. I wish you all the luck. I know you guys and girls have absolutely got it and you'll smash it. Let me know how you get on in the comments down below. From La Fenasosa though, I'll see you next time.