How to Balance a Bike in Place

Series Summary

The modern sport of cycling originated in the 1970's and has been gaining popularity as a legitimate sport ever since, especially with the health boom of the late 90's. As this upsurge of amateur biking enthusiasm continues to reach untouched parts of the globe, the varieties of cycling continue to multiply. One of the great ways to enjoy cycling is by mountain biking and trail riding in the great outdoors. Not only is mountain biking a fun hobby, it can also be a great cardiovascular workout. Riding through rough terrain and shrubbery on driven trails is a test of stamina, and requires conscious awareness of one's surroundings at all times.

Mountain biking may seem like an extreme sport, but even a beginner can easily get started. In these free cycling training videos, learn how to trail ride for the first time. Our expert will show you bike balance techniques, how to do wheelies, techniques for getting past obstacles like tree branches, how to do a bunny hop, how to control speed (especially downhill), and more. Check out these clips and then plan your own mountain biking trail ride this weekend. You’re sure to have a blast!

Video Transcript

"A basic maneuver that’s really going to help you out a lot is learning how to balance in place. It’s commonly referred to as track stand, because it’s a maneuver that racers on velodromes, which are tracks that they race mountain bikes on; really have to do a lot. But basically what it involves is finding your balance point and then moving yourself around on the bike to maintain that balance point. I mean with practice you can pretty much do it indefinitely on any sort of terrain. The easiest place to learn how to track stand is on a hill, because you can use forward pedal pressure to counteract the bike’s desire to move backwards. So you see I have the same foot that I descend with do everything else with my left foot, I have that forward. I’ve turned my handlebar to the right, so that it’s closest to my left front foot, which also allows me to effectively counter balance. In this situation it helps a lot too that there’s a divot, but you can see when I come and try to turn my handlebar to the left, to do the track stand I can do it, but see how I’m struggling a little bit more having to give it a little bit more of a, a little bit more of a pedaling foot. So this is good in case you get stuck somewhere on a trail, either someone falls behind you or you see something that you don’t know or you don’t want to go through the hassle of getting off your bike, so and it opens up a lot of fundamental techniques. One thing that you can do is if you know how to hop you can do a little correction hop to help get your balance. In that situation I just lost my balance because I’m on pretty rough terrain and I’ve been looking forward for way too long. So the next section we’re going to talk about how to really fully apply the track stand. "