Mountain Biking - Dealing with Trail Obstacles

Scott Scudamore: Hi! My name is Scott Scudamore; we are talking about riding your mountain bike with confidence. In this clip we are going to talk about Obstacles. You will run into obstacles every time you go out for a ride, everything from rocks to roots to logs across the trail. What we are going to try to do in this clip is to show you that most in cases obstacles is as big as this round, is you can just go right over that, what I'd like to call a rollover; you just rollover with your bike. If you have your position, if you have your butt pack off the saddle, your arms nice and loose and you can basically without even lifting your from front wheel up you can just roll right over the obstacle. So, Shawn is going to demonstrate right now coming across as if this obstacle was just a nice, easy one and his tier is just pacing, going to roll right over it. He is hardly even going to do anything; he just rolls right over the obstacle. So, as the obstacle gets a little bit bigger, then you are going to have to pushdown on the front a little bit to be able to lift up and come over it. On this shot he is actually going to, to demonstrate as if this was a little bit bigger obstacle. He will show you that by pushing down on the shock before you start to, what we call, 'preload the shock'. He loads it and then lets it come up; you can come over a lot bigger obstacles than just this little one here. So, he is going to come through now and show you. He As he comes up to the log, he is going to preload his front and then he will be lifting the front wheel up and will come right over. He preloads, he lifts up and right up and over. That is the idea on most obstacles in the small rocks and logs like that, just doing the front wheel over is enough the back wheel will just follow through.

As you get a little bit more professional in your riding in the trail you will be able to -- there is other techniques that we can teach, intermediates and advanced techniques, but for the purposes of this clip today, we are just trying to give you the basics of some of the normal obstacles you are going to see on the trail. Shawn is going to come through again and you will watch and you will see as he comes through and he goes over the obstacle.

All he is doing is just slightly lifting up and then if you notice the back wheel comes up a little bit with that as well. So, the whole idea -- and when you are going over the obstacle, if you rollover, just as you get after you got the front wheel over, if you roll your wrist, you will find that the back wheel will automatically come off the ground just a little, what we call that un-weighting. You are just un-weighting that rear wheel; it will just roll right over the obstacle behind you. So, you will see as he comes through now, he is going to, to over the obstacle and he is going to roll his wrist and that will automatically just bring the back wheel up and over as he is going. So the idea of obstacles is to understand that your bike -- everything up to this high, you can basically just roll right over if you have got your weight back on the saddle, your bike will just rollover any of those obstacles out there, whether it is roots, rocks or logs across the trail.