Thursday 11 October 2012

Bringing the rider out in Brian














 Brian came down from the Malverns for his session that was a birthday present in the form of a gift voucher. We chatted over a coffee about his past experiences and aspirations and then I set to work. The skills check was first and I found I had to work on his looking and body positioning in all areas and I made set up changes to support this.
 The first technique we applied his new mental and physical skills too was the drop technique. It took Brian no time at all to ride all 3 drops and land perfectly so off to the skills trail we went to work hard on cornering. Pumping, rock gardens, steps, fly out jumps and drops were linked to flat, bermed, off camber and switchback turns by the correct braking areas. We moved down the trail bit by bit always adding the previous sections to the next and it wasn't long before Brian was riding the entire trail end to end smoother and faster than ever. Any errors were known by him without me even having to say anything.
We moved onto jumping and using a 6ft tabletop I demonstrated why his new skill set applied to jumping. Brian followed suit and soon was sailing effortlessly over the tabletop and then used his mental skills questions to decide positively to ride the 6ft gap jump side too!
I wanted to develop the mental aspect of his jumping so we linked a corner to a 9ft gap jump next and once again, Brian rode it over and over again.
We finished our session on the pump and jump trail where we worked on choosing whether to jump, pump or manual through sections of the trail.
Great session Brian!
High5!


2 comments:

  1. Looks like Brian is a natural anyway! No way you'd be able to improve my riding by that much! ;)

    ReplyDelete