How to Break Down Steep Rolldowns when Mountain Biking

Video Transcript

"When it's steep and you're faced with a roller, something that you want to roll down, keep your tires in contact with the obstacle at all times, you need to slow down enough before you get to the obstacle. Slow down a little bit on the obstacle. Not a lot--you want to do that at the top. You don't want to be slowing down when you're at the bottom, when the G forces are at the maximum, because your bike's already fighting for traction then. And adding braking to the whole equation reduces the amount of traction. So you want to brake before you get to the obstacle, once you very first get on it, then you want to get off and commit until you get to the bottom. Once you get off of it, depending on what's ahead, then you can, if you feel like you need to slow down, that's when you slow down. Don't slow down in the middle of an obstacle. So as I ride this section of rollers here, you'll see that I do a lot of braking before I get there, I do a tiny bit of braking right at the beginning here to get my front wheel and back wheel around the corner, and then just gradual braking down till I get to that drop. Okay, so, I don't know if you noticed, but in the middle of the roller there, I did more braking than normal, and my back wheel actually broke loose and moved around all the way. And that mostly had to do with what I was thinking about after that section. I knew I wanted to stop when I got to the bottom of it, instead of gaining speed. So, by braking my back end loose, it allowed me to get farther over to give myself more room to slow down. But, you know, if I'd been braking right after that--when the back end started breaking loose--and stayed on the brakes instead of letting loose of them, I would have spun out completely."