How to Compress Your Mountain Bike

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: Instead of un-weighting over an obstacle, sometimes you really want to compress your bike into it, really drive into it and depending on how you hit the obstacle and what you do with your body. You can either use that compression as a launch, as a jump to jump through a section. You can use it as sort of a water bar, as something to break your momentum. Or you can even use when you're compressing, compressing your bike down, usually makes your bike easier to spring back out to change directions. So in this case, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to come fairly slowly down through this section, I'm going to really pump into and over at the backside of all this little terrain features just to get control instead of the backside of things. And then this one particular rock at the end here, I'm just going to try to suck up as much as possible to stay on the ground and keep going in a straighter line as I can. So, I intentionally tried to run into as many things dead on as possible to really exaggerate what I'm talking about, which is let your bike hit an obstacle, sort of compress it as it goes in, so it keeps nice and stable. As it comes back up and the suspension comes back up, you want to push it back down. Get back on the ground as soon as you can and then just keep going. And once you get used to do in that in a straight line, when you start getting compressed and bucked in corners and stuff like that, you'll know how to respond."