Can I Learn to Backflip My MTB in One Day

Yo guys, welcome back to the YouTube channel. Today, we are at Woodward West Skate Park in California. This is one of the biggest indoor and outdoor skate parks in the USA, I believe. In this hangar, there is a huge foam pit and another skate park, and the goal today is to learn a backflip. Never done a backflip in my life, never tried one before, but I've been studying Matt Jones, a Red Bull athlete, pro freerider, and basically the king of teaching backflips. I recently watched a YouTube video on his channel where he coached his mate Jamie through the whole process in just a few attempts, so today, Matt's going to be our virtual backflip mentor. The goal is to first backflip into the foam pit, and if that goes well, send it to the harder rubber resi ramp, all in one short session. Let's get stuck in and see if we can pull this off in time. We're in the hangar. The size of it, it's massive. Jump boxes, spines. Let's go. Effort to get out. Trying to get comfortable with the lip of the jump. Quite steep, really long foam pit. It will be scary. I'll just tell you that. It will be scary, because you've never ridden it. Yes! That felt weird. I like attempted to look, and then stopped looking. We've done a few straight air jumps into the foam pit, and it is more of a mental game than anything else. We watched a few videos this morning on how to do the flip. On this, there's no determined landing. When you would nosedive into a jump usually with this, it's just a big foam pit. So you feel really strange in the air, and obviously if you nose into the foam pit, you go over the handlebars instantly because it's so soft. So with the flip, what Matt Jones was saying was, this trick happens to be one of the scariest ones to learn, but also one of the ones where physics works so much in your favor. That take off rotates you around a quarter of a backflip already, so you've just got to put some energy and input in to go with it. By the time you take off on a jump, you've done a quarter of a backflip. Then it's just a case of looking up, trying to find the peak of your helmet, and just keep looking, and keep rotating, and commit to it. Look back. Oh, I forgot to yell. Look back! I'm stuck. So that time I literally went off a lip, leant back, and then just stopped looking back when I saw the roof. Did you stop looking? Yeah. Now I'm stuck. That was good you didn't try that on a real jump. You're into this quest now. Are you up for it? Yeah. I'm up for it now. Well done for offering some level of commitment. I can't. That was better. I keep just bailing. What is the stupid brain doing? Keep looking back. Go with it. Oh no. I had my camera on my helmet then, and it hit me in the face, so a bit of a tip, don't use sticky pads on helmets in foam pits or flips, because you could lose them. I can feel it now, like the rotation makes a bit more sense. So at first I thought backflips were all just about committing, leaning back, and hoping for the best. But pretty quickly, I learned there's a lot more going on. The way you take off completely changes how fast you spin. If your legs are bent, like you're sitting in a chair, you rotate faster. If you pull the bars on takeoff, you spin harder. And if you're more relaxed and stretched out, the rotation slows down. Then Bree got a message from one of her friends who's already dialed in the backflip. He said, Sit in a chair off the lip, get your butt over the back wheel, squat like you're sitting, and keep your shoulders square. Chin up to rotate, tuck in when you spot the landing to slow things down, and whatever you do, do not let go of the bars. After reading this message, everything started to click into place. You do YouTube? Huh? You do YouTube? Yeah. I'm subscribed to you. Are you? My heart's racing. Oh man, just freaking pull back on it. Yeah. This is it. Don't let go. Don't stop looking. That was better. Yes! Back so- You alright? Yeah. You really went for it then. If you got yourself into a ball in midair, and like made yourself smaller, you'd have spun twice as fast, and I reckon you'd have done it. Yes boy. And it's a good thing you buried yourself, because it meant you were at least upside down. Oh. You're well on the train now. Get in there. Keep going. Does that kind of overcome some of the doubts? Yeah. Get back up there. Back landing on there and all sorts. Yeah. Even open your mouth. When you open your mouth, you can put your head back further. Try it. The mouth trip is epic, and it works really well. Before I'd ever attempted a backflip on a mountain bike, I'd never been upside down in my life, so I thought I'd go to a foam pit and try a backflip on my feet, just to see what my commitment was like. We both managed to land a standing backflip, having never done it before, and it all just comes down to commitment, looking back, and tucking into a small ball to spin faster. Now back to the bike to nail this backflip. All right, a little bit faster. Oh. Hello. Yes, dude. That was a backflip. You did it in three. I'm so stuck. Yeah, that's all right. That's how it goes. So your bars were in your lap, like you were doing a backflip tuck no-hander. That doesn't make you small. I think you need to aim for the bars in your armpits. I think bars to nipples. Bars to nipples. Because that's like pulling the bike more around the rotation. I got that. Go, go, go, go, go. Yay! yes I did a flip so what I'm trying to do now is get five decent flips in a row before I flip it to the resi ramp which is like a harder composite with a bit of foam underneath it's kind of middle ground between the foam pit and wood problem is like it's super short landing and I'm trying to not go so far in the foam pit on the flip okay so I've done about five or six now I feel pretty comfortable with so we're gonna give the resi a go and let's do this level up oops yeah I got real scared then yeah I'll do it just got real scared yeah that was scary as no have you done it have you done it yeah oh yeah yeah yeah I've never done this before though well I've got a good helmet so did three attempts then and we looked back at some of the footage and it looks like I'm not getting enough height right so I'm gonna go back to the foam pit and try and do a higher flip and then come back to the resi because the resi ramp landing is like a foot higher or half foot higher so I'm spinning okay but not getting enough height whoa that's it I spin hard I should do it all right this time you have to fully commit to these bastards all right so I think we're gonna call it a day mainly because I'm getting tired my brain is getting tired I threw about seven or eight attempts at flipping that on this resi ramp which I'm pretty stoked with I got two or three round which were you could maybe class as riding them out what I'm finding is if you're not a hundred percent committed up the lip to pull the flip then you literally will stop spinning midair upside down which is why it's so scary Woodward West skatepark if you ever want to come and just dial in tricks like the foam pit resi ramp huge skatepark which we haven't even touched because I've been so focused on this backflip stoked to get the flip now we're gonna do it to dirt