More Tips for Jumping on a Mountain Bike
Relax Your Upper Body
Relax your upper body. Tensing your upper body comes from the Fight or Flight mechanism – in this case, the fight part of it. You want ALL your pressure to manifest through your legs, and not your arms. Try this on: Coast around on your bike with a slight knee bend which puts your knees over your toes. Push down through only your legs. If you are on a full suspension bike - the bikes suspension - both front and rear, will compress evenly given that it’s tuned properly.
Resist Pulling Up
Riders often assume that pulling up will give them more air. In most cases, the opposite is true. For more air, you want more compression into the jump face, which means we firm the legs up more into the ramp of the jump to get bigger air. Remember it’s the jump that possesses the energy you are trying to tap into (or often are scared to tap into) so you want to compress into the jump and allow the rear wheel to roll all the way to the lip of the jump.
Creating Functional Style
While this video is about jumping basics, you can see that I’m getting quite a bit of movement off most of the jumps (I do demonstrate straight air a couple of times in the video, but it’s less comfortable for me as an experienced rider). While it might look like it’s all for show, there are reasons advanced riders almost never ‘straight air’ on a bike. We’ll get into functional style in a future post. For now, go out and practice your basic jumping with the principles we just outlined.