SoCal Mountain Bike Racing | Dreamscape Images

Mountain Bike Slideshow Collection – Images by Dreamscape Images

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By Keith Rejino

It’s the first mile of the mountain bike race and your stomach is playing tunes you don’t like.  Sounds of “bloat” and “blot” are on Stomach Radio and reminding you that maybe you ate a bit too much this morning.

So how do you figure this pre-race meal plan out?  Sometimes what you grab out of the refrigerator works, but other times it doesn’t.  Here are some guidelines to keep the tunes in your stomach to a minimum.

1.  Recover from your last mountain bike workout with adequate supplies of complex carbohydrates and proteins.  Doing so will top off your glycogen stores, which is the first fuel used during exercise and constitutes 80% of your total glycogen storage. 

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By Patrick J. Cohn, Ph.D.

Can mental rehearsal or visualization help you trust in your ability during competition?

One Olympian thinks so.

To perform your best, you must have trust instead of over-think your performance…

I certainly learn a lot from Olympic athletes when I pick their brains. That’s why I do several interviews a year with top athletes and coaches.

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By Keith Rejino

Your mountain bike is nearly perfect.  With the adjustments you made in Part 1 and Part 2, you are now ready to adjust the final piece…your suspension system.

A finely tuned mountain bike suspension system can save you a crash, bring you closer in times to the pros, and make your rides more comfortable and rewarding.  A perfectly adjusted MTB suspension system isolates your bike and body from the rigorous terrain, and keeps your tires connected to the trail.

Mountain bike manufactures continue to produce more advanced and tunable suspensions systems.  If you’re riding on the latest shocks from Progressive, Answer, Fox, Avalanche, or others, consider consulting your owner’s manual for advance tweaks to your model type.

As most suspensions systems are based on the same basic principles with one adjustment each for rebound and compression damping for both shocks and forks, we’ll focus on the basics here. Read the rest of this entry

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By Keith Rejino

Now that you’ve warmed up and made some easy mountain bike setup adjustments with the saddle and brake controls in Part 1, let’s dig a bit deeper and take a more technical look at the not-so-easy MTB adjustments.

Bar and Stem – most MTB manufactures spec out the bars and stems for the size frame, likely size of the rider, and the intended use of the mountain bike.  As this is a good starting point for most MTB riders, tweaking the stem and bar sizes to perfectly match your torso, arm length, and riding style can improve your mountain bike performance.

If your goal is to maximize your climbing ability, using a long stem between 90 to 120 mm with a low rise angle of less than 10 degrees creates a powerful pedaling position, and keeps more weight upfront for climbing.  To keep you nicely stretched out, a flat or 1-inch rise bar is best. Read the rest of this entry

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By Keith Rejino

It’s waiting for you in the garage…your horse that will take you up the mountain trails.  You’ve ridden her a few times, and she’s bucked you off on a couple, kicked you and hollered at you.  The vertical summersault over the reins was not a pleasant experience!  But you can call her your own.

What if you can adjust the saddle a bit to make your horse and you ride as one, not as two separate imbalanced entities, but one fast, efficient machine?  Like a horse rider, to become one with your mountain bike takes some work, some observations to your MTB’s reaction on the trail, and an eye to your own body’s movements. Read the rest of this entry

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