A noob needing a drop tutorial.

armandbig33

Hi
I am new at mountain biking and i own a hardtail.
i watched a bunch of yt videos on how to do drops... but some of them say i should use a manual to drop and others like seth's bike hacks's trail bike drops, say i should pull on the bars.
now i always thought i should use my eeight and go all the way to the rear tyre with my butt but now i dunno what to think.
in the vids everyone looked chilled ehen dropping. what i mean by that is that they weren't popping their butt to the wheel they just seemed to.... drop. they seemed to do absolutely nothing but lift the rear wheel and i dunno how they did it.
PLEASE TEACH ME HOE I SHOULD DO A DROP RIGHT.

rockmonkeysc

It depends on the drop and how fast you go off the lip. The point of lifting the front wheel is to stop it dropping before the rear leaves the ground. Quite often, you're landing on a down slope so you want the front to drop a bit and just moving your weight to the back wheel is enough, this also works at high speed drops to flat. At lower speeds you'll need to lift the front, a manual is the best way to do this although you can shift your weight back and put in a crank to lift the front but this is easy to mess up.
The most important thing is to relax and enjoy it. Tense up and you're more likely to crash.
Once you can do small drops, big ones are exactly the same technique. There's a ten foot ladder drop at my local which looks really intimidating but is actually really nice and gives a good smooth landing on even short travel trail bikes.
The ideal drop to learn on is one about 2 foot with a straight run in and a slightly downhill, smooth landing and nothing hard to hit if you come off.

cooldad

I'm pretty rubbish at drops and jumps, being a coward, but a lesson in how not to drop.

New pair of drops put in on a bit of trail I'd ridden hundreds of times. I had a quick look on YT and they looked easy enough, but I spent the ride up to them joking about how I expected to die on the new 'Drops of Doom'.

The first one was a bit higher than I expected, but no problem with that, and the next, about 10m further on looked even higher.

I thought do I slow down and roll, or speed up and drop, drop or roll, roll or drop? Maybe take the chicken run?

So I did none of the above and just nose dived off, the bike bounced, I went splat, wrecked my shoulder and put a nasty gash in my knee (the left one if it's important.)

Moral is commit and ride it, don't think too hard.

rockmonkeysc

Exactly. Most accidents on drops are due to riders not committing.
When in doubt, go flat out (unless it's a really big drop with a short landing)

armandbig33

yea thx guys.
also my bike has a really high cross country seatpost i think it's one of the major problems in my "manuals"
I believe so cuz whenever I get my hip back i always end up with the saddle in my way... doesn't go any lower i guess i ll buy a new seatpost..

rockmonkeysc

You'll need to either drop the saddle or remove your plums