FLOW

After building all the basics, show-off skills like holding wheelies will start to feel easy, and you begin to play around with them in different situations.

Because you’re now handling the controls in a much more automated fashion, while also having built up correct movement patterns, riding becomes a lot more fluid.

Do the wheelie — and do it often. It’s not only cool to do, and not only fun to do (and fun to present to your friends), but also helpful in sections or with certain technical obstacles.

This is also where you can start to effectively train non-stop and series of obstacles to become quicker and more dynamic in harder terrain and challenging sections.

By now, you’ve mastered connecting series of techniques and flowy riding — like going from floater turns directly into a stoppy and dropping off the next ledge.

The more you play around like this, the more you’ll find out two things:

A. It’s probably not useful in competitions.
B. It’s unbelievable how much fun you can have on a trials bike!

If you want to step it up from here, there is a nice collection of trials freestyle skills you can acquire, for example the 360° stoppie twist.

Most of these high-level skills take quite a good amount of time to learn, so the best advice is to keep your focus, learn the new skill in isolation, and then bring it back and integrate it into your flowy riding.

Most important tip: All the basics must be dialed in 100%. Otherwise it will take forever (yes, even a stoppie twist is about getting asymmetrical peg loading right).