What is the Disaster BMX Bike Trick?

Series Summary

BMX biking, or bicycle motocross, is an extreme sport that originated in California in the late 1960's and has become an increasingly popular activity in the past few years. Cyclists ride specially designed bikes with smaller wheels and other special features that allow for 360 degree turning of the steering wheel. A BMX event allows BMX riders to show off their skills by performing innumerable extreme tricks, however safety is very important, and every BMX rider, whether young or experienced, should always wear a helmet, along with elbow and knee pads.

In this free instructional video, our expert will explain and demonstrate a variety of BMX bike tricks. He will focus on quarter pipe and lip tricks, like the Disaster, Tail Tap, and Fufanu, giving step-by-step instructions for each and then performing the trick. You'll also learn how to do a Double Peg trick, and an Abubaca trick on your BMX bike. So grab your bike and get ready to ride, and as always, wear a helmet and follow proper safety instructions before trying any BMX bike trick.

Video Transcript

"The disaster is one of the first basic lift tricks that most people ever learn on a BmX bike. It essentially is when you ride up a quarter pipe and do a 180 but you actually don't 180 out up on the deck. You land with your front wheel landing inside the transition and your back wheel landing up top. It is called the disaster because is you end up in that position while your doing air a couple feet out your really going to be on trouble. However, if your aim is to do the disaster than it's actually a really fun trick and a really good building block for a lot of other basic lift tricks that you can do. The basic thing to keep in mind when doing the disaster is that you don't want to go to fast. It's not really going to be to bad if you go to fast but at the same time you want to make sure that when you are spinning that you keep your front wheel over the transition and not have it come up on the deck because then basically your going to be doing a 180 fly up. So the main thing to keep in mind once you gauge your speed appropriately right about so that you can get up on top of a quarter pipe not a whole lot faster than that is that picking up and turning around you want to start looking down and into the transition because if you keep looking there that is where your front wheel is going to go. Essentially you whip the back end of the bike around you don't spin around the center of the bike so much like if your doing a flat ground 180 or something. You actually want to pivot more around the front wheel if your going to map out where you are pivoting. What this does it allows your back wheel to make it up on the coping not the deck area and you'll end up in this kind of position. It feels a little scary at first but rest assured that unless your doing it on a really steep quarter pipe that your going to be able to roll into it fine. It is a little bit scary the first couple times once you have the disaster really locked in it's a really good building block for a lot of other more complicated tricks and it will also probably give you the confidence you need to do a lot of other basic lift tricks"