How to do a Tail Tap BMX Bike Trick

Video Transcript

"Right now I'm on this quarter pipe because the other quarter pipe that I'm going to do a tail tap on is pretty much exactly the same thing. Dropping in on this and then going across the park to that other quarter pipe is going to give me an idea how much speed I'm going to gain off of this but also how much speed I'm going to loose coming up the other quarter pipe. So, here it goes, get a drop in, quarter crank, put my back wheel up, I'm over the transition there, and I roll back in. As you can see, I stalled up there for a little bit longer than I normally would to give you an idea of how once I put my back wheel down, my bike naturally spins around. It's a little bit easier to drop in from a tail tap when you're lined up almost perpendicular to the quarter pipe. At the same time you don't want to pull the stall too far because what will happen is you'll spin around past it then you kind of have to drop in the opposite side that can be a little bit scary. At the same time, if you want to experiment with how long you can hold a tail tap like that, that'll give you a better idea once you start trying to do more advanced tricks like 540 tail taps. So like I just showed you, you basically want to make sure that you're carrying enough speed that you can get up onto the deck of the quarter pipe not a whole lot more than that, although once you actually get really good at the trick, you can air three feet out or four feet out to tail tap but that's really not the way to learn it. So again, just enough speed to get up onto the top with just a little bit of extra pop because you don't want to have to muscle the bike up into that position and once you spot where you want your back wheel to be which is usually about four or five inches inside the coping, you want to put your back wheel down and absorb the impact with your legs and keep your arms pretty straight. As the bike spins around, you don't want to spin around as far as I just did that was more to demonstrate the fact that the bike will spin, you want to hop and think about it almost as if you're just dropping into a quarter pipe with your front wheel up because that's really what you're doing. So, it's a little bit scarier to jump off from that position but at the same time if you keep your front wheel steered so that it's facing straight down the quarter pipe you're going to ride out of it just fine and even if you are in a little bit too far and you can't jump out far enough to clear everything, all that's really going to happen is you might hang up your back tire a little bit and as long as you're not doing a tail tap on anything with two or three feet of fort on it, you should be able to roll out just fine. It might not be as smooth as it could be."