How To Bike

Hey guys, I'm a BMX flatlander. My name's Mario Carelse and I ride for Team Extreme, and I'm going to be showing you some BMX tips and hints. We're going to talk about how to bike in general today, which is quite a broad subject depending on what kind of biking you want to do.

You might find yourself on a race track, a velodrome, a BMX track, flat ground like this if you're riding BMX flat grounds, even the road going from a to b. Now, there's certain things you need to know about each of those aspects but you will find them out as you decide what your niche is going to be. If you decide you want to be a mountain biker, you're going to be hitting the trails, so you're going to learn all about the trails, you're going to learn how to negotiate trails, how to avoid objects, how to control the bike in the air, how to take on jumps and things like that.

If you're on the road, obviously you're going to be road biking you're going to be looking at things like health and safety, how to negotiate the roads correctly without putting yourself in danger or other road users, your safety gear. It's always important to have your high visibility vest, especially at night. If you're riding, have your lights on your bike, your reflectors, and have your safety gear, have your crash helmet and your gloves, if need be.

BMX riding, again, depending on what aspect of BMX you're doing, you want your safety gear, you want to make sure your bike is in a good setup, and you want to know the fundamentals like how to stop safely, when it's safe to go out on the roads and when it's not, basically. A lot of it is common sense, you will learn these things as you go along to bike. The main thing on the roads I'd say is just braking correctly.

If you're going at speeds on road, which you will find yourself doing if you're travelling from work or school or anything like that, you want to be able to brake, and if you have to stop suddenly, the worst thing you can do is just pull your front brake, and that's in any aspect of riding. You don't want to be doing, sort of, a decent speed, jam on your front brake because you panic, because all that's going to achieve is you flying over your handlebars, it's not going to be good. So, the best thing to do is to, hopefully, you'll know where you want to stop, so you want to stop, brake in a good distance before.

Now to do this, you want to start feathering your back brake, the bike will slow down by just doing that. And then, if you're going quite fast and you need to stop in a hurry, you want to put your back brake on first. Try and avoid the bike from skidding, it will be tempting to do that, but that takes you out of control a bit.

You want to just put it on firmly, but if need be, release it a bit, then at the last minute, start dabbing the front brake, but very gently so that you come to a kind of like squeaky stop, but it will work you know, rather than slam your brakes on. That's going to take you out of control, and you could end up hurting yourself or having an accident. So always be safe, know how to brake, and make sure your bike is in good working order and road safe. .