How to become a better dirt bike rider
Posted on April 16, 2010
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When your starting out there are so many things you need to learn in order to ride a dirt bike. You think you could be as good at motocross and supercross racing as Chad Reed, Jeremy McGrath, Ryan Villipoto or James Stewart. Or maybe your into freestyle motocross and think you’ve got what it takes to pull tricks like Blake “Bilko” Williams, Nate Adams or Cam Sinclair.
Then there’s reality, you get out on the track and try to clear a jump, say a table top for starters but your not really sure how much power you need to clear it. You pin the throttle and hit the ramp only you’ve jumped way to far and had your weight to far forward. You end up nose diving and knowing what your in for pin the throttle in the hope that the rear end will drop and you’ll land safely. Nope, at best you’ll be limping around for a couple of days.
After a while you learn to gauge how far you need to jump to land on the down ramps and your getting pretty good. Someone forgot to tell you about ruts on jump faces though and for some reason the bike kicks sideways of the peak of a ramp and you are all crossed up when you land, oh no, here comes that soil sample again.
How do you become a better dirt bike rider? Ride your bike. Take your time when trying new things and build up to them slowly, knowing what you can and can’t do. Think about what people tell you and take everything you read online with a grain of salt. Watch what the faster riders do on the track, look at their body position, listen to what the pro’s have to say. You probably won’t put any of it into practice until long after you knew about it though.
Unfortunately the most important lessons are those we learn the hard way, like the things I did when learning to jump the I mentioned in the beginning of the post. You can’t just get advice on something an expect to go out and do it straight away. When your able to do things it will come naturally and you will then release what you should have been doing all along was something you had been told or read about before.
So reality aside what advice can I give you?
When learning to jump keep your body in the attack position central to the bike, try to stay relaxed, you’ll most likely become a statue in the air though. Start with table top jumps and gradually work your way to jumping the full distance. Keep the bike in a higher gear rather than under power and keep a constant pace don’t back off but give the bike a little more power just before taking off.
When cornering try to put your leg out straight, don’t dangle it down or sideways. Sit on the opposite side of the seat to the direction you are turning, lean the bike and push against the outside of the bike and down on the outside peg. Power out of the corner from the apex. Make sure you’ve got good tires on the bike and practice pinning the throttle to get a feel for the rear end slide.
Use your legs to steer the bike and point your toes in to grip the bike over rough obstacles. Shift your weight off the seat and to the opposite direction to steer the bike while standing.
Keep your weight way back when braking to get maximum traction. Practice taking the inside line and braking harder if you usually take the outside.
Make adjustments to your suspension in small increments if you think it could be better. The more you play around with it the better you’ll get, but be careful as the wrong adjustments can be very bad for the bikes handling, if not dangerous. I increased the compression dampening so I didn’t get as much spring when learning to jump and not quite making the distance. This was great, only problem was now I had head shake in the front end at high speed. Not so great.
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Is it better to learn how to motercross race 1st then move to doing freestyle?