Mountain bike drive trains can be confusing at times with 27 plus gears at your disposal.  Choose the wrong gear and you could miss your optimal cadence and lose power and time during your weekend ride or MTB race. Read the rest of this entry

Tomorrow you will become the master of MTB braking skills.  Who cares you may think.  Why is braking so important?

Your XC mountain bike training is a lot of work and you work hard to get faster.  Essentially, you are working out to improve your energy output.  MTB braking is about dissipating the energy you’ve worked hard to create.  Or if it’s a downhill ride, you’re dissipating the energy gravity generated for you.

If you under or over brake from the optimum, you could be singing the blues if you fly off your XC mountain bike into a cactus bush where you’ll spend the next 30 minutes pulling thorns out of your behind.  If you over brake, you could also be wasting valuable energy and losing XC MTB speed.

Brake For Speed…

Good braking can make you a faster XC mountain biker.   Buy one to three seconds per corner or section of a trail and you’ll be done with your first Clif Bar and bottle of Gatorade before your friends arrive.  Take these MTB brake skills to the races and you’ll move up in the race rankings. 

Improve your braking and you’ll also use less energy getting to the finish line.

Become a master of MTB braking skills with these ten XC mountain bike tips: Read the rest of this entry

So you’ve tackled some long climbs up some steep hills this Fall and Winter. But can you fight to the finish line the last quarter of a mile of the race? Can you overtake a competitor up the steep climb? Can you sprint out of the starting gate and get to the front before the bottleneck of the single track portion of the course begins?

Consider these five xc mountain bike tips to take your sprinting skills to the next level.

1. Attack and give 100% – Commit all your resources to driving the pedals and maximizing your speed as soon as possible. Make every effort to reach your maximum rpm in the fewest pedal strokes possible. Shoot for 20 pedal strokes…then 15…then 10 and so on. Read the rest of this entry

Take Your Mountain Bike Skills To The Next Level

From the first part in this series, you learned the first steps to improve your mountain bike skills:  When the terrain gets challenging and you need to improve your XC mountain bike handling, keep a light touch on your handlebars, get off your MTB saddle and stand on your pedals to lower your center of gravity.

To add another layer to your mountain bike skills and improve your MTB handling, consider these XC mountain bike tips to add to your MTB skills toolbox. Read the rest of this entry

Your mountain bike setup is nearly perfect.  With the mtb setup tips 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

Now that you’ve warmed up and made some easy mountain bike setup tips 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 setup tips.

Handlebar and Stem – most MTB manufactures spec out the handlebar and stem 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 handlebar sizes to perfectly match your torso, arm length, and riding style can improve your mountain bike performance. Read the rest of this entry

Mountain Bike Setup Series

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