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Bicycle Handling And Technique

Throughout my approximately 4 years of recreational and commuter cycling, I’ve mainly concentrated on getting faster, buying better bicycles, getting better at hill-climbing (haha!), vehicular cycling techniques, and other main staples of cycling.  These all sort of come naturally over time.  Some of the things that don’t come quite as naturally to me are bicycle handling and mountain biking technique.  And I’m sure easy and difficult aspects of cycling vary from person to person.  I’m not the most graceful person at mounting and dismounting, track stands, braking, navigating tricky areas of trails, and other technicalities.  However, mastering such minor details make a big difference overall, especially in improving your confidence.

I find cyclocross, fixie tricks, mountain biking techniques, and other YouTube material really entertaining, actually.  And it always makes me wonder how in the world such people were able to attain such mastery of their bicycle and how long it took them.  Achieving such a level of technique must really improve a lot of different areas of their cycling.  So while flipping through the nifty cycling videos on YouTube, I stumbled across a series of videos done by Expert Village (a subset of the massive eHow.com collection of videos) done by Mickey Denoncourt.  He really goes into some good detail about a lot of technique that new cyclists often wonder about.  Without further ado, here are the YouTube links.  I’ll post the main eHow page link, the playlist, and all the individual links.

So, after watching this series, my mountain bike and I went out to a local, grassy park and practiced some maneuvers and techniques.  It was a actually a lot of a fun and a pretty good workout.  I made a lot of goofs, but I had a good time and there was lots of fluffy grass to land on!  Anyway, I highly recommend this kind of exercise in bike handling since it is a good way to find out what your limits are on your bicycle and how you can control your bike by shifting your weight around.  Give it a try!

Edit, 10/10/2011 – Found another similar series by Kurt Exenberger of Austria!  Enjoy!

July 14th, 2011 | Category: Challenging Rides, Cycling

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