Tuesday 5 April 2011

Uncovering the rider in Will






On meeting Will I could tell he had developed some mental barriers in his riding and I began working on this by seeing what skills were missing and present. I found he lacked footwork and looking in corners and that he had a huge unweight of the front wheel but it was held down by his head position. Once corrected things really took off!
We moved onto the drops and Will used his unweight perfectly and never looked back again. All three drops were ridden at different speeds and his confidence grew massively as he found out how physically easy the technique is and also why the mental skill set takes the fear out of riding.
We then moved onto the trail and i broke the trail into 4 segments and worked on the sections contained within each before linking them to the next segment and so on. I showed why the speed manual is a great speed management tool . we worked on pumping, rock gardens, steps, fly outs, climbing, drops and flat, bermed, switchback and off camber turns. Will really was flowing nicely and when I followed him down the entire trail the braking was in the correct places, the hurry was taken out of riding as he looked into what's next. Footwork and looking in corners uncovered a great body position in Will that was bogged down by the missing skills only to re surface once I had corrected the errors.





We then moved onto our final technique for the session, jumping!
Will was surprised when I said he would clear the table top in the next 10 minutes and in 5 moves he sailed over it with ease with a smile all over his face.


Will called an end to the session after after a while as the adrenalin rush took it's toll and tired him out. I then gave him a demo of me riding using the exact skill set I had given him and the session ended with a coffee round the fire pit.
Great session!

No comments:

Post a Comment