MTB 101 - Skills »
Cross country skills: Lifting the front and rear wheel to avoid obstacles
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in Ashwin’s series of cross country biking skills. The first entry explored some basic basic concepts about bike handling, the second discussed the trackstand, and the third looked into rear wheel tracking.
Lifting your front and rear wheels off the ground is a good skill to have in your arsenal when you’re trying to ride over logs and ledges or attempting to perform the infamous bunny hop. Before we look at those specific skills I’m going to break down the movements associated with getting each individual wheel airborne.
Again, these write up are written from an xc perspective, but they are applicable skills for riders from any discipline.
Why is it important to lift your wheels over obstacles at all?
These days, many riders are beginning their adventures in mountain biking with some serious travel on the bikes that are underneath them. Riders from this camp often question why there’s a need to lift their front or rear wheel from the ground at all, especially when they’ve got the suspension to suck up the unwanted bumps.
The main reason for lifting your wheel can be broken down into one key concept: momentum. Any hit that your front or rear wheel takes on the trail eats into your momentum which, in turn, serves to slow you down. For example, lifting your front wheel over a dip rather than plowing straight through it will give you some extra speed when the move is done right. In addition, the ability to get your front and rear wheels off the ground is a great way to get your bike over obstacles you can’t ride over.
Lifting the front wheel
Many beginners lift the front wheel by yanking up with their arms. While this method works, it only gets you so far since you can’t get much height and there is only so much range of motion available before your hands hit your chest. In addition, there’s a tendency for the front wheel to slam down at the end of this movement — something that can throw you around at speed.
A better way of approaching a ‘front wheel lift’ is to think of your arms as a conduit for transferring a shift of your center of gravity. When you shift your center of gravity backwards and you can get the front wheel up smoothly. You know you do it right when the front wheel ’sets’ back down on the ground and doesn’t slam down. In the below series of pictures you can see that:
- I keep my head up and level.
- I ‘preload’ the front fork and front tire by pushing down first. This preloading allows me to take advantage of energy from the tire and fork compression.
- I shift my center of gravity backwards through by pushing my hips backwards.
- My arms are used as conduits to transfer this center-of-gravity shift. I do pull a little with my arms, but it’s not as harsh as if I yanked up with my arms.
This type of motion is the precursor to the coolest of cool: the manual. I can’t even get close to a manual but there is some serious mojo going on when riders can keep the front wheel in the air by pushing down and forward with the pedals .
Picking up the rear wheel
There are several situations where you’d want to pick up the rear wheel alone. For example, suppose you’re moving too slow to clear a branch with a full bunny hop. You can pick your front over the branch first, and then follow that move by picking up your rear wheel to clear the rest of the obstacle.
As with lifting the front wheel, the basic movement is a shift of your center of gravity forward, combined with either pulling up on your clips or pushing back/up with your feet to lift the rear wheel.
I wish I was better at lifting the rear wheel without relying so much on being clipped in. There I said it. Sometimes, to try and break my habit, I will wear my tennis shoes and work on lifting that rear wheel without being clipped in. Even though I can only raise the wheel an inch or so off the ground, it’s the motion of pushing ‘back and up’ with the soles of the shoes that is really important. After practicing with flat-soled shoes, I find that I can get a smoother, higher lift when I go back to my clipless setup.
Conclusion
The ability to lift the front and rear wheels is crucial for improving your mountain biking skill set. They are building blocks for more advanced skills like bunny hopping, riding over logs, and up onto ledges. In the next posts I’ll put the skills I discussed in this writeup to work, and use them to get up and over obstacles such as logs and ledges.
1. Posted by Terminator | 9:46 am, 14 March 2006
Looking at your Rear wheel lifting its easy to see why you rely on being clipped. The problem is the angle of your forearms. The trick is to keep your whrist straight and grabbing the grips very tight. Doing this your bike will follow the angle of your forearms during the move. Looking at pict. 2-3 we can see that you change your hand position during the move.