Ride Skills - Rotation for Advanced Flat Corners.
For this month’s ride skills article, we’ll look at a technique to find more security & confidence in flat corners.
Flat corners can be a nemesis for riders. This technique will improve your stability, and ability to drive the bike through the turn with better traction - so you can find your inner Kovarik or Sam Hill.
Set yourself up for success.
Some of the fundamentals we have covered to date really come into play here. As you arrive at a flat corner, we need to check off a few things to improve our control. These are especially important when you’re acquiring new skills in flat corners.
Speed control. Enter slow, exit fast - scrub your speed early. Do your best to leave the brakes alone during flat corners, because we don’t want to add braking forces into an already complex physics equation of maintaining traction. Arriving at a manageable speed will help you stay on your desired line through the turn too.
Position - hinge at the hips, get that chest a bit lower. We want to increase the mobility in our arms so we can bend & extend them to lean the bike under us. Being lower gets our centre of gravity a bit lower, which is more stable, too. Importantly, this gets weight on the front tyre.
Line - choose lines that open flat turns up and create a bigger turn radius. You’ll have more time, and you can make smoother movements to carry flow and exit speed.The Ingredients
Cornering - The techniques
Finding ways to sperate your body from your bike in flat turns is critical for control.
Corners are hard because there are several techniques that all need to be sequenced in correct order, at the right time, and in the right amount. This becomes even harder when our support is taken away from us – i.e. in flat corners.
Most corners need different amounts of steering, leaning (with & without the bike) and rotating movements. We’re going to focus on the last of those three to zone in on finding more stability and grip - hopefully giving you another tool for your flat corner toolbox.
Rotating - What it is, and why use it?
A rotated rider is not only more stable in flatter turns, but can also find more range of movement to lean the bike under them, if needed.
This is, in my opinion, one of the most effective techniques to employ on flat corners. I use it a lot in my own riding.
Rotating, is twisting your body so that it faces ahead, or ‘leads’ the bike in the turn. In flat turns, we can’t rely on the support of a berm to give us grip – we need to proactively create grip where it isn’t.
It’s more stable because your mass shifts towards the outside of the bike and stays better aligned, or more ‘on top’ of your base of support (which is your tyres’ contact patch). We also physically create more room to tip the bike underneath us. This engages the side knobs of the tyre to find more grip. From here, we can easily adjust how much we lean the bike under us depending on how scarce grip is, or how tight the turn is.
See the above example. On one side I’m fully rotated, lower and leaning the bike more. On the other, I’m just leaning with the bike and staying tall. I’m exaggerating this for the purpose of the concept. The yellow line shows the lean angle of the bike. Notice how my body is distributed around this intersecting line – about 80% of it is ‘outside’ the bike on the left, and it’s a dead 50/50 on the right.
The more I lean with the bike as one unit, the further my mass gets away from my base of support - I become increasingly unstable. I probably couldn’t get much more lean-angle out of the bike if I kept leaning this way (this was as far as I was comfortable going!).
This is where rotation enters the mix. It’s a great tool when we need to find a way to ‘disconnect’ or ‘separate’ ourselves from the bike to stay stable & keep our tyres gripping. I’m no ski coach but watch a slalom skier and it’s no coincidence there is a bunch of similarity in the movements they are making with their lower body.
How to rotate better
Focus on the knees, or feet, to rotate more of your body.
Rotation, especially in the amounts I am demonstrating, requires a high degree of bike/body separation. Quality rotating movements rely on a rider to have already consolidated a low, centred position on the bike and an ability to lean the bike underneath them (since they are closely linked).
When initiating rotating movements, I like to focus on the knees – twisting both knees in unison to the exit of the turn. This gets more of your body linked into the movement.
You’ll feel your feet, knees, hips and torso collectively engaged in this rotational plane as one cohesive unit. Imagine you have flashlights on your knees, and you need to move them together to illuminate the path ahead. Or think about getting your outside kneecap into the top tube of the bike. You may feel your feet shifting around a little inside your shoe, too – this is a good sensation to aim for, just make sure you keep your shoe on the pedal!
You may have heard of ‘pointing the belly button’ to achieve this, but I feel the knees get a bit more of the body working.
Structuring your practice
Follow cam on a rider working on their rotation. Look where his hips are on the bike, and where his knees are pointing.
Find a grassy field with a gentle gradient and get practicing. Remember, get your position low & mobile first. To introduce this movement, rotate your knees around the bike to initiate gentle sweeping turns. You’ll find your bike wants to start turning naturally – that’s fine, let it happen.
If you then find your hips moving laterally around the outside of the bike, you’re doing it well – Imagine your hips are connected to your stem with a piece of string. Your hips should be creating almost a pendulum-like movement around this stem, sweeping from side to side around the bike.
Develop this by trying to rotate more, or less, depending on the tightness of the turn or the amount of support you have in the turn. Another idea is to explore how how it links to leaning the bike under you – see if you can lean the bike more from a rotated position.
When you feel comfortable, take it to the trail and use it in some turns. I really like using this early, before the turn, to set myself up and get more of my turning done early. It’s also awesome for maintaining direction and grip on off camber sections, too. In the early stages, try to make your movements smooth and fluid to avoid any sudden mishaps.
Key points
- Find more stability, drive and traction by rotating your body ahead of the bike in the turn, or towards the exit.
- Focus the initiation of the movement from the knees, to engage more of the body in a rotational plane.
- Ensure you’re already comfy with the fundamentals of being mobile, centred and lower on the bike first!
To drop or not to drop?
Bonus content - Should you drop your outside foot?
There’s pros and cons to this age-old cornering theory. The pro is that you create more clearance to the lean the bike over more. This can be helpful to find more grip, or for tighter radius turns.
The cons are that it can be inefficient on turns where we don’t need to lean the bike over much (e.g. big bike park berms). It also increases the cognitive load on the rider, especially when learning it. Lastly, it’s easier to pump corners with level pedals - A more symmetrical lower body gives access to quicker, more powerful pumping movements.
I like to keep this technique for advanced riders and employ it more as ‘degrees of movement’ on a dial, not as two pedal positions (level, or dropped). This produces a much more useful and adaptable tool for the rider to make choices on the trail.
I’ve been focusing more lately on using the outside ankle as an ‘anchor’. Wherever your crank arm is, drop the anchor by dropping your outside heel. The ‘anchor’ creates more strength and structure to that outside leg and engages it to feel like your outside foot is securely driving the bike. It doesn’t need to be stiff; you can still manage bumps and inputs by flexing the ankle joint.
These articles are designed to unpack some of the riding theory behind improving your skill set on the bike. If you’re keen to get out there and give them a go, be mindful to choose appropriate terrain (something easy for you, often an open field is a good place to start) and be prepared to feel some funky new sensations as you ride. Feedback is key, so get some footage (or a coach) to guide your journey. 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.
