Bad Technique

can you do it on a mates bike?

I think having a good technique allows you to transfer your riding skills to different bikes or different conditions successfully.

People customise their bikes to take advantage of their specific riding technique. Flats or spds, tyre choice, HT or Fully...

Flexibility would be my definition of good riding technique...

its all a load of crap, if it works for you then thats all that matters.

you shouldnt care and i dont se it as cheating, i see it as a dfferent technique which you prefer.

for example: when we are taught to drive, we are supposed to hold the steering wheel in a 10 to 2 position on the wheel and to pass the steering wheel hand to hand. it is rare to find someone who maintains this technique once they have passed their test. reason why? crossing your hands and holding the steering wheel in a different configuration is more comfortable, makes driving more enjoyable.

there arent any mtb police responsible for maintaining correct technique on britains trails, just do what you like.

sheepsteeth wrote:

there arent any mtb police responsible for maintaining correct technique on britains trails, just do what you like.

the way this regulation obsessed country's going it wont be long.

You can hop higher and generally in more control if you do it "right", the SPD hop is very effective though. If you combine it with a "proper" bunnyhop I reckon you get the best of both worlds though. The SPD hop tends to be a fairly clumsy, high impact approach though, and you're throwing a lot of weight around so it's hard to do with precision- IMO it's harder to put any sort of turn into your hop this way, whereas with the "proper" hop your movements are more subtle and there's less muscle involved.

I reckon, personally, that if it gets the job done then it's all fine. Also, it's better to use the "wrong" technique well than the "right" technique badly, some of the tricks I use are pretty half-assed on paper and I wouldn't try and teach anyone else them but they work for me so why not?

But, sometimes it can bite you, frinstance for a long time I relied on a wee pump on the forks to help hop my front wheel but you can't always do that and when you can't, suddenly you're in bother. A lot of wrong techniques seem to work perfectly well right up til they don't.

Buckled_Rims wrote:

Good technique is far overrated. Don't get me wrong, if you can get the skill and have the time to practice, great. But when you work all week and have only the Sunday to go out and ride, then I'd rather enjoy myself then having to worry about this or that technique.

It's not so much worrying, often a bad technique gets you to the bottom but a good technique will let you do it faster, or in more control, or more safely.

I used this example in a full suss vs ht thread a while back but it works here too, there's a really nasty rooty descent near me, with lots of scooped out roots so it's very easy to hook up either wheel on a root and suddenly stop mid descent. On my Idrive, I can pretty much just get my weight back and smash over them- bad technique, but it works.

But, I rode it on my Soul and had to do a lot more weight work to get the rear wheel to climb out of the scoops. So, the technique that worked on the Idrive didn't work on the Soul.

But, the catch here is that if I then took the better technique which I used for the Soul, and used it on the Idrive, I got down in much more overall control, and had much more fun since I was less of a passenger, and was faster to boot (and less likely to ding a wheel or pinch)

So, the bad technique did work but that doesn't mean it's just as good as the good technique.

I'm far from MTB police, just the opposite, I like to see people doing what they want, wearing what they want and on whatever bike they have :-)

Having said that I think that correct technique is invaluable. In the example that you give, a SPD hop will probably be great, but using a SPD hop you're in more danger of loosing your balance to either side because you're throwing your weight about more. Also it's very difficult to put a turn into the hop, if for example you want to hope the log and land nicely at a different angle to make a corner.

Not that I'm an expert or 'owt :-)

'bad' ways of doing things usually don't scale or transfer well to other situations. I rely on my SPDs for bunny-hopping myself and don't have the motivation to learn it properly with flats but the downside is I can't bunny-hop nearly as higher as people that do it properly. Same with drop-offs I guess, if you just roll them and rely on luck rather than body positioning etc then once you go above a couple of foot you'll be in trouble.

yep it can be dodgy after using and hoping with spd's then going back to flats, ive left my pedals while hoping and off jums forget that im not clipped in.

Graydawg wrote:

Sod technique, just batter your way down the trail and hope for the best! :P

just what i was thinking lol