By necessity, my mountain biking has changed since 1991, when I bought my first, fully rigid 26″ wheeled bicycle. The adaptations have come in fits and starts. First, suspension (although barely) entered the picture and then bigger wheels (27.5″), then more suspension, then even bigger wheels (29″) and then dual suspension. Each of those evolutions altered the way I handled the bike, though I didn’t think about it that much until I started coaching a friend of mine, who just got into mountain biking a couple years ago. Suddenly, I’m breaking down how and why I do what I do, and that has me reflecting on the ways handling a short travel 26” hardtail with clipless pedals is maybe not at all like working with a longer travel 29er with flats.
In the most basic ways, the old bikes and the news bikes are the same. You transfer your weight forward and backward to go over obstacles. There’s some lateral movement and balance thrown into the equation, some dynamic body positioning that allows you to absorb impacts, etc. Two wheels, in a line, two triangles (sort of), and the core challenge is the same.
At the same time, the old mountain bikes are an awful lot closer to fat tire road bikes than they are to the modern dual suspension mountain bike, and as a result some of the ways you maneuver them are different as well.For starters, the bike’s suspension doesn’t only absorb shock, it also enhances spring. With an old school 26” hardtail, to lift the front wheel, you’d pull back (not up) on the bars and kick your feet under you. With today’s bike that movement begins with a downward compression of the suspension, loading the bike with upward force. That means you don’t have to pull back so hard, your weight can stay over the wheels more, AND you get more lift.
Let’s look what is, in my opinion, the most useful move in all of mountain biking, the punch. At the crux of this movement on an old school bike, your weight is farther back and then you really need to be clipped into your pedals to lift the rear wheel (in essence you’re jumping with the bike attached) behind you onto larger obstacles. On newer bikes, your weight remains further forward. Almost without thinking about it, you compress the rear shock, which gives you even more bike lift.
And so, you can do all these big moves with less effort and more poise. The challenge stops being one of “pop,” but instead, one of timing, because all that weighting and unweighting takes time, and while you have access to much more pop than before, timing it is harder than it used to be.
The bounciness of today’s frames, and the way a properly compressed bike sticks to your feet is behind the popular move from clipless to flat pedals. As I said, on the old bikes, clipless pedals gave you a means of pulling the rear of the bike up after you. There were other benefits, but in technical riding, I think the thing that gives old school riders pause about moving to flats is that fear of losing control of the rear of the bike.
If you learned to ride in the olden days (I did), there’s an adjustment period where you learn to accentuate shock compression and internalize the belief the bike will follow you. And of course, there’s the aforementioned timing challenge.
Today’s full-suspension 29ers eliminate many of the challenges yesterday’s bikes contended with, and it’s fair to ask whether this is, in some way, cheating. I prefer to think the new bikes have just moved the goalposts, giving us access to bigger, more technical terrain. Flat pedal riding gives us a quick way to step out of a crash as it develops, lowering the barrier to progression (and thrills). Naturally, the skill set is slightly different, but I think all the learning that leads to confidently managing a big, modern trail bike is backward compatible with improving your skills on all the other, less technology-packed bikes you ride, even your road bike.