STEPS

When starting out, obstacles usually feel bigger than they are. The bike bumps, your body gets stiff, and you might instinctively do (weird) hasty movements when the front wheel touches something.

That’s normal. Before real step technique begins, you need to develop a feeling of how the bike moves without you fighting it.

Start by developing a good movement flow on small steps which are stressfree for you.

Exercises like Feel Your Bike can help to quickly find out how your body works together with the suspension. One-Handed Level 1 to 3 is great to learn clean dynamic body movements.

Also worth to mention: Conciously rolling over & hitting tiny objects like roots, wood, or flat stones.

Your goal

Stay centered, relaxed, and let the bike move underneath you. With enough repetition, you'll develop a feeling for timing & where the wheels are in every moment.

While you’re still building fine control and stable balance, it is hard to get all the details of complex step techniques right.

But if you don’t just go full-send mode every time you ride — with the only goal of clearing obstacles, no matter what — and instead sprinkle in isolated technique work for body movement, timing, and clutch control, you will have a much easier time progressing in the future… even if it feels harder right now.

Just hitting one obstacle over and over again and hoping everything gets better will take a very long time. Let’s train in isolation, which means:

First: Body movement in two phases
Second: Precise front wheel lifts
Third: Clutch control through friction zone drills

If you do all these now, you will quickly hit higher obstacles in a relaxed manner.

Nice double blips! Hitting the edge becomes easy, as well as staying on your back wheel when you need it.

Now you can work on the details to truly master obstacles and build the base for later techniques like steps from a standstill, double steps, or jumping off your back wheel.

Personal recommendation: Train your front wheel precision until it’s perfect — so you can place it exactly where you want it, down to the centimeter, a hundred times in a row.

Timing is getting precise. Now, video analysis is one of the best ways to find out exactly how and when you are using the clutch — as well as what your body is doing.

We would also strongly advise you to train storing power in the flywheel and how to use strong clutch pops, so you can improve aggressiveness and speed of power delivery in all step techniques.