Lifting the front. @Neil Price - @Marsel @Ron Hensley & I have been having a discussion about the last videos he posted of his rides up the big rock face. It got me thinking about how we get the front into the air. 1. For front hops etc. we focus on pushing or rocking our body weight back, then bringing the front up. 2. For obstacles we focus on staying right over the pegs and letting the engine/flywheel drive the front up. It seems incredibly common for us to regress the second toward the first. I started wondering if it could partly be because it's not 100% clear in our heads that these two are not just applying to different outcomes (eg. hops vs obstacles) but also two different ways to rotate the bike? Not sure I'm explaining it very well here. I guess it's a bit akin to you clearly defining Ride, Punch & Splat. Without that clear understanding that they are different techniques to get up an obstacle how confusing would it be to break down what we're doing? I know there's a difference in that in eg hopping our goal is lifting the front, while in the 3 obstacle techniques our goal is creating lift & traction. But it's inescapable that creating lift & traction results in lifting the front, so in the macro scheme of things they are different techniques to a similar result. Another way of looking at it might be that we learn RSG as a pattern to later apply automatically (& I recognise that RSG is how we end up getting lift, traction & ultimately the front wheel lift I'm talking about). The problem we see often arises when people are faced with something bigger than they are 100% comfortable with, so in their head they want to get the front wheel up quickly. The technique for lifting the front is push back & lift. Perhaps if we'd spent time drumming into our heads that we can also lift the front by accelerating the rear we could more easily adopt that technique without regressing. So the question here is really, "Would we benefit from learning the two front lift techniques as just that, two front lift techniques. So we can more clearly replay the applicable technique in different situations?" I'm seeing this as an extra little step. Learn RSG, then play with it specifically as a way to lift the front. How fast can you lift? How short a distance can you travel? How high can you go & recover? etc. Or does this muddy the waters? Yes, it's cold & wet & I've not been riding the last few days, so too much time to think. 🫤😁

Posted by Peter Mack at 2023-05-31 23:19:27 UTC