guide to trials rideing (Mountain Bikes - General Tips & Comments)

Name: missinlink

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Product:	Mountain Bikes - General Tips & Comments
Date:	11.05.01 (1222 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fun

Disadvantages: painful

well seeing as i have written a long opinion about B.M.Xing, I thought ide write you all an opinion about trials riding.

What is trials riding?!?! i hear u screaming at your computer!
Well trials riding is basically where you move around a course which can be naturally made by nature ie rocks and tree trunks and stuff like that or it can be man made ie big barells and other bits like that put together to form a course.
The idea is get around it without touching the thing beneath you with your feet or your pedal and to do this you need a great deal of balance! its one thing you really need to master as well as the other things which i will tell you about in a miniute.

Im going to give u a better description of a trials course because it might not be very clear to you at this point.
imagine a forest with a few trees that have fallen down maybe creating a path. It has a few big rocks around them aswell.imagine them quite close together. Yu would have to say start on the first log in the course and bunny hop forward onto the next tree stump or log or rock. You would have to be able to stop and balance and be able to square your bike up for the next jump, as you get more confident and better, you can get onto better courses.

Incase you are wondering, bunny hopping is where you somehow manage to jump and both wheels leave the ground, the better you get at it the more complex hop you can do. As you get more confident you can bunny hop sideways, do like a 90' hop or if you get really good you can lean back on your back wheel and hop like that I can only manage a few but im getting there.

Where I live there is not many natural places to ride so I have to scour the streets in search of places to ride. My favourite thing to do is to side hop down steps od side hop of one wall onto another, Its pretty scary when you do it but its really cool when you pull it off, especially if people are watching :)
Basically you find an o
bstical and try to ride over it or up it or off it or whatever.

People do Trials riding at a professional level and if you are lucky enough to get a sponsorship deal then thats when the fun starts. You are invited to competitions, bike demos and basically you become famous in the biking world.

The next thing youll need to know is what bike to get. Well none other than a Trials bike will do. They differ from a normal mens bike frame. The whole frame slants bak at about a 40' angle. They are light and very strong. They have minimal amount of gears some dont even have any atall they just have the single chainset. They dont have a front mech,usually if they dont come like it people will put a small B.M.X chain ring on the crank and on the wheel. Usually they have hard straight front forks instead of suspension and they dont have rear suspension. They are odd looking bikes as the seat post is put right down to the frame so basically it looks like the seat is attatched straight to the frame. This is so when u jump u can bend your knees alot to get alot of height and to cushion a landing, so you dont have a seat up your arse, but its there if u bend to far if you know what i mean.
Hydraulic brakes are very useful. There extremely powerful. When I pull my rear brake it is so strong you can see the frame bending either side of the wheel!

This kind of bike is great fun to pull great tricks on, like endos and stoppies and complicated tricks I have not yet mastered.

Oh I have forgot to include price!
Well basically you get what you pay for!
I have a Raleigh Fishbed and its a slalom bike so i kinda improvise abit when i trials ride. It cost £499 which is good price for the spec on it. You can pay alot less but as I said the more you pay the better the bike.
I think one really good option if you have the money time and knowlege is to buy a frame and then custom build it, I havent really come to any conclusion wether or not
it is cheaper that way but atleast you can put on what you want.

As far as fitness is concerned, You need to be physically strong and quite tall, The stronger you are the more control you have over your bike and you have more strength to jump higher and further.

well if you would like to know more just ask

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