Mountain Biking Tips

Mountain Biking Tips by Scott Scudamore and Shawn Punga - How to Ride a Mountain Bike

Scott Scudamore: Hi! My name is Scott Scudamore and today, we are going to show you how to ride a mountain bike with confidence. I have Shawn Punga with me today; we are both with the Mid Atlantic Off-Road Enthusiasts, the local affiliate of the International Mountain Bike Association, IMBA. We provide these clinics throughout the last five or six years for our members or prospective members. Today, we are going to give you an overview of the bike; how it operates; show you what a good fit is, things that you should do before you actually start to ride, some checks that you should do with your bike. We are going to show you proper techniques and how to go up a hill; how to properly and safely do what we call Control Descent, going down the hill; we will cover techniques of cornering and turning your bike and things that you should do from that perspective and then last thing we will talk a little bit about the art of falling. I will see, you want to have a good fitting bike; you should always have a helmet on, properly fitted to your head and a good pair of shoes. Shawn and I both use biking shoes that actually clip into the paddles for safety and one of the things that we teach our folks in all these clinics that we do is when in doubt, dismount. If you come up to an obstacle, you are not sure of it, you got to downhill that you are a little sketchy on, just stop your bike-get off your bike and walk over or walk down it, it is much, much safer way then going down and crashing. So, as we said I am with MORE and IMBA, the International Mountain Biking Association. I am the local rep for the Washington D.C area. MORE and IMBA, we have been doing these clinics for about seven years now. They started with one of our members named, Tom Mathis and he call it the Mountain Bike Boot Camp and a lot of the techniques that we are going to show you today, have come out of his work and his knowledge. We have kind of refined his work over the years and took different techniques from different people, reading different books and stuff; but the idea is we try to come out here and give you the confidence and kind of break down the different steps in riding a mountain bike in the lowest common denominator and then it just becomes fun. Okay! With that we get started.