Mountain Bike Equipment Technique
Getting Fully Sussed
Each issue we refer to it. It’s one of the single most expensive elements to our bikes. It is fundamental to the way your bike works & feels. It can be pivotal (quite literally) to our performance and a major factor in our overall riding experience. For the vast majority of us, it is probably the least understood element of...
The Workman's Tools
All too often what you are riding is seen as the biggest limiting factor to the trails you can tame and the speed you can carry. Magazines and videos are filled with highly skilled riders on super pimped steeds riding super technical terrain, descending at speeds only previously considered achievable with the aid of a zip wire. Technology clearly plays...
Featured
Night Riding
With the days in the Northern hemisphere shortening faster than the odds of a turkey seeing in the New Year, this issues technique feature looks at Night riding. Some of the article will look at which skills are required to get more out of riding at night, but equally, if not more important, is taking a look at how riding...
Conquering Camber
We often think of trail as up or down, ascent or descent. The reality is we live in a far more three-dimensional world where often the fall line of the terrain is crossed rather than followed. The cross fall of the trail can challenge a rider and present a problem that pushes them to places either they don't want to...
The Golden Thread
Much has been written about ‘line choice’ as an important aspect of taming the trail that lies ahead. This issue we put our usual spin on the subject with the ultimate goal of making you a better, faster rider. Line choice is indeed an important skill to develop, but from experience we know that when you are out on the...
Contact Points
In this edition, we are getting all touchy-feely (in an appropriate manner) as we look at contact patches. No matter what we do on the bike from simply rolling along the road to ram-raiding a boulder field we have just a small amount of surface area in contact with the bike and the terrain. We are of course talking about...
Riding Ruts
Love or hate them, ruts and deep-scoured sections of the trail are something that we are likely to encounter at some point in our mountain bike experience. If you ride fall-line wild trails on soft ground or lap race courses in the wet then that narrow groove cut in the dirt will be a familiar nemesis that can end a...
Speed Control Part 3 - To Haul Or To Stall
From shifting to slowing we now continue to roll through our trail craft technique and delve into the world of all that will stall. Welcome folks to another in’stall’ment of finding your flow, we’ve been getting down with some basics in the previous editions, and we continue the theme of maintaining speed by looking at trail elements that want to...