For this article, I’d like to unpack a few strategies behind improving your riding skills and how we learn new things. Mainstream sports like rugby, golf and tennis have very clear coaching and skill development pathways, and it’s commonplace that players in these sports will be drilled over and over in the fundamentals of the sport.

That isn’t really the case with mountain biking, and there seems to a shroud of mystery around how to improve your mountain biking skills. Seldom do we see riders specifically and deliberately practice, especially the basics. Most will just rely on increasing terrain difficulty or speed to feel challenged - but there’s plenty of other ways to set up quality practice and feel challenged.

If you’re committed to improvement, I want to dispel that mystery and unveil some strategies you can use to effectively develop your skills - so you can ride with more control, confidence and fun in the long run.

Establish Your Motivation

How far you’ll make it through your skill acquisition depends on the strength of your motivation. Your mindset is everything, and being truly committed to learning is an important first step in your journey.

Goal setting is a natural progression from motivation, and it’s key to providing a direction to your practice. It could be that you want to keep up with friends, you want to improve your track times, you want to ride a specific trail, or - one that I often come across - I want to ride safer and crash less.

Whatever they are, write a few down somewhere. They are essential to structuring your practice pathway and process to improving on the bike.

How we Acquire & Develop Skills

Understanding the process of how we learn can help you make sense of what’s going on behind your own skill development. As coaches we’re constantly aware of this, but I think it’s just as important for the ‘student’, so you know what you’re signing yourself up for. This helps to manage your expectations along the way and can help you to stay positive.

When we’re motivated to learn something new, we do it in stages:

Stage 1 - Cognitive

Our first contact with the skill. We know what ‘good’ looks like, but we don’t know how to find it or consistently feel it. Our physical movements will often be jerky, tentative or poorly coordinated. We’re ‘in our heads’ a lot here, with lots of self-talk because we aren’t sure what we are doing right or wrong. Accurate analysis and quality feedback are essential to moving past this cognitive stage quickly.

Here’s the kicker - your success rate is going to be variable, and you can expect to fail at some point. This is normal. Focus on the positives and celebrate the successes to stick with it.

Stage 2 - Associative

We’re now starting to refine our movements to create more consistent outcomes. We transition from using clunky thought processes towards quickly recalling memorised movements. We start to get an association of how much and when to move to manipulate the desired result. We’re not perfect here though, and there’s always a chance of failure.

We can stay in this stage for a very long time and for most, they will never move past it - look at the bright side though, you’ve learned something new!

Stage 3 - Autonomy

This is the territory that’s often described as the 10,000-rep stage, or skill mastery. Here, we’re able to use the skill without even needing to think about it - especially the basics of it. We’re adaptable, can detect problems and make small corrective refinements with fluid, smooth movements. People here may be performing at an extremely high level with little visual effort. Very few will get here.

There are three things I would like to highlight here:

Trust the process. Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you don’t get something first time, that’s normal - stay positive and patient.
Mountain biking is difficult because the skills involved with it are constantly changing and multiple skills are often happening at once. Add in variables to terrain, bikes, conditions…. yeah. We need a process to simplify things.
Failure and success are equally important to developing skills. Failure in mountain biking is more consequential than most others - this isn’t shanking a pitching wedge or dropping a pass. Managing risk is essential.

Practice and Time

Were Amaury Pierron and Erice van Leuven once at the same stage as me? Yes, and their skill autonomy comes back to two things - practice, and time.

It Takes Time

Skill mastery can take a lifetime of dedication. But for most of us, we have jobs, kids, social lives and various other things that restrict the time that we can invest. So, use your time to focus on progress, not perfection. You may never reach perfection, but you can progress - even if you don’t have much time.

We need to practice with the time we have, but also acknowledge that the big picture of developing skills takes time too. The volume of practice (aka, time) it takes to acquire skills will differ from person to person too, but speed at which they develop often comes back to the quality of their practice.

Whatever you can manage, get out there and practice towards progress - it will all add up eventually.

Creating Quality Practice

What’s the best way to practice skills? Set up your environment to create purpose to your practice by changing three challenge dials:

Consciously choose a technique - the simpler the better.
On suitable terrain.
At an appropriate speed.

These create purpose because they lead you to ride with intent, which is a new way of riding for most - it’s a fun, refreshing change to the same old ‘just riding’. They also help to keep things simple and reduce the chances and consequences of failure - especially in the early stages of skill acquisition. You won’t be biting off more than you can chew.

It’s really hard if you are trying to ‘unlearn’ bad habits while simultaneously trying to acquire the correct ones. Start at the ‘minimum’ setting for each dial to give your brain a chance to think. Then, as you develop, turn one dial at a time to increase the challenge to keep it engaging and explore further skill development.

The Three Challenge Dials

An example of how you can challenge yourself in the topic of braking in corners. Purposeful practice with variations in these dials will improve your chances of skill autonomy,

Technique

I always encourage riders to place their emphasis on riding with quality technique first. Choosing the right technique to work on is where the role of a qualified skills coach is very valuable (and can save you time). Change this technique dial to refine your ability to perform the skill.

If in doubt, bring it back to basics - fundamental skills like body position (e.g. staying centred) and braking (e.g. using more front brake to stop skidding) are good places to focus. “The best do basics better” is one of my favourite mantras.

Terrain

Suitable trails that facilitate a technique focus are usually easier ones, but don’t see this as a step backwards - it will be like releasing the shackles to explore new ideas. There is an unsatiable desire for some to explore trails beyond their skill level and call it practice. You’ll improve much faster doing the right things on easier trails, than the wrong things on harder trails.

Try turning the terrain dial all the way back. Like, all the way back. So long as technique comes first, skill development can even come from a 5 minute session mucking around on the street. In my work, I spend a bunch of time with elite athletes on green trails - albeit having them practice very advanced techniques. The point is you don’t want to be so focused on processing the track that you don’t have the freedom to explore new ways of moving.

Sure, when the time is right, transfer your skills into more difficult terrain - only you can guide your choices here, based on your quality of execution and comfort level. My personal mantra (from the PMBIA) - “Maximum technique, minimum terrain”.

Speed

Slowing down is a great tactic to use. It gives you more time to execute movements and make a better mental connection with what you are doing. It also allows you to ride more relaxed, with better mobility - usually when speed increases, we stiffen up both physically and mentally.

When you’re doing things correctly and comfortably, gradually increase speed - so long as technique still ‘sticks’.

Focus on a Process to Progress

Want to get better at something? Either by yourself or with a coach, break it down and focus on each step.

Okay, so we’ve acknowledged that skill development takes time, and we know how to practice. Now how do we structure that practice? Break it down into a process. For an example, an outcome could be “I want to learn how to corner better”.

We could build a process to improve that - refer to the image above. Within each stage of the process, allow enough time to experiment with the challenge dials and session. The key is we’ve broken it down, focused on one step at a time and taken enough time at each stage to purposefully practice.

Feeling success at each stage of your process builds confidence and awareness - It’s proven to produce better results than getting fixated on the outcome you’re aiming for. This process strategy will help you spend less time in the riskier ‘cognitive’ stage, because you aren’t trying to coordinate too much at once - it’s safer because it’s simpler.

Further, because each task is more achievable you have more chance of sticking with your commitment to improve and developing your skills into an ‘association’ stage. You’ve set yourself up for success, rather than blinding aiming for an outcome.

Think of any process as a pathway to achieving an outcome. Get it right and you’ll unlock tangible progression that you can really feel.

Key points:

Focus on one thing at a time. Keep it simple.

Spend enough time practicing before moving on. An easy trap to fall into is to get a taste of success and suddenly ramp up the speed, terrain or technique and expect to replicate the same success. Take your time and practice - got it right and it felt good? Nice, now do it again.
Get feedback - whether it’s from a coach, a self-filmed video, whatever; but remember that once you’re past that initial cognitive stage, good technique feels good.

Track the Process

We need some form of analysis, and feedback from the eyes of an expert coach is invaluable. There are ways to self analyze, but just be clear on what your ideal image is. Professional athletes are an excellent place to visualize what ‘good’ looks like. Take the above video for example - can you identify the good from the bad?

Be kind to yourself along the way. We all have times where we’re ‘feeling it’ and other times where it’s just not clicking. Accept this as part of the process and understand it’s perfectly normal - stay positive. Remember that failure is part of learning, view it as an opportunity to improve. One of my mentors, Ross Dunlop, once said something along the lines of ‘that person is so good because they were prepared to fail more than others’. It’s true.

On that note, don’t be afraid to take a step back if you need to. Assess where you are at and focus your time where you’re going to get the most return.

Go Learn Something New!

There we have it, some strategies to learning something new on the bike.

Committing to improvement is an admirable thing to do, because it’s vulnerable place - it’s upsetting the status quo of your riding and being prepared to take a step back to move several steps forward can be daunting.

However, if you can commit some time to purposefully practice within a carefully structured process, you’ll be well on your way to riding better and having more fun on your bike. Happy trails!

This article contains some material and ideas from the Professional Mountain Bike Instructors Association. It is written to unpack some of the riding theory behind improving your skill set on the bike. These articles are in no way ‘absolute’. Our sport is dynamic and ever changing, so there will always be exceptions to some of these general concepts.

Beyond the Bike - Strategies for Progression