My buddy took this with my iPhone at last night's session at the Goats. Kind of a cool photo but it would be better if I had good form and was throwing a tail whip! Always room for improvement.
ChrisCowan.us
I'm just your average 30 something white geeky male who want's to be cool... but it's hard when you drive a minivan!
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I'm not sure if I mentioned this or not here (hard to remember with all the Facebooking) but last year I made a goal after my trip to Northstar that I wanted to improve my bike skills. That trip was a real eye opener on the areas that I needed to improve. I came up with a list of things I wanted to focus on: bunny hopping, manuals and dirt jumping.
My approach was pretty simple, watch a few videos a 1000 times and then read as much as I could about how to do each skill. Then I took what I learned and tried to apply it. It took me a few weeks to nail down a halfway decent bunny hop. I went from not being able to bunny hop 1 inch to easily clearing 12 inches consistently in a matter of three weeks. I was feeling good about this progress until I had my niece shoot some video of me actually doing the hop.
It was ugly... really ugly, center of gravity was too far forward and when I went to preload my bike I looked all weird on the bike. Here take a look:
To the untrained eye all your seeing is me clearing the box of bunnies. But to those in the know... let's just say I vomited a little into my mouth when I saw this for the first time (The music makes it a little more palatable :D). But in all seriousness it's a good start and I finally got past the pulling both wheels off the ground at the same time. But it still needs some work.
The second goal I started working on after the bunny hops was getting comfortable jumping. My first couple of months was just getting the courage to go for it an actually pedal into the jump. Once I got airborne (and crashed a few times) I finally got into the grove enough to attempt some bigger jumps. And of course once I looked at video of me jumping more vomiting ensued...
Notice any similarities to the bunny hop? Yup... my ugly form hadn't change and followed me to the jumps. The problem to me is clear, my body position on the bike is totally crap. The solution... not so clear.
With these problems in hand I decided to post them on James Wilson's Inner Circle website to get some professional opinion on how to work on these issues. He responded and asked what my kettle bell swing looked like. So I made another video of my swing and posted it on the site:
He responded with a video breakdown of my swing, how the issues with it translate to my jumping and what I should do to fix it. One thing he pointed out was that my body position on my jumps are the same as my position on my swings... which is wrong!
Whoa! (cool lightning bolts huh!) Along with the video break down James also wanted to know if I was interested in being his guinea pig. The idea was to take someone like me (an average joe) and transform me into an amazing trail rider (an above average joe). The only hitch was I had to fully commit 100% to doing everything he said. Without hesitation I hit the reply button and said "HELL YEAH!" (I'm paraphrasing).
The first step was keeping a food log of everything I ate along with the times. The goal is to eat a protein and fruit/veggie every 2-3 hours. You wouldn't believe how honest keeping a food log makes you with your eating. It's also good way to deterred you from eating that box of double stuff Oreos, especially when you know someone's going to be reading it.
A few days later he sent me my workout routine which he aptly called the Fundamental Movement Skills program. The idea behind this routine is to nail down three different movements: locking out your hips (which you need to do for climbing while standing), getting your hips back (for the attack position) and increasing your lateral strength (for turns). The programs uses a progression of movements to take your from the basic concept to the more advanced moves with the idea of mastering each phase along the way. This was exactly what I was looking for, a training program which would help me nail down the movements for the three fundamentals of good form.
I'm 4 workouts into this new program and so far I'm pretty impressed with it. I think my biggest weakness is my box squats (which is the first movement in the progression for fixing my swings and ultimately my form). The nice thing about having a big weakness is getting to see that disappear. Last week a light bulb went off during one of my workouts and the next thing I know I'm doing good box squats every time. I just moved up to the jumping box squats and it's revealed my next weakness, engaging my hips in jumps. I've had a few good reps with the jumping box squats and I can see that improvement is within reach. The real excitement will be when these start to translate over to my jumping on the bike.
PROGRESS!
