No matter the reason, you’ll need to train your cardio, endurance and technical skills to improve as a mountain biker. Mix up your training rides with some obstacles and off-the-bike exercising to give your skills a boost.

One of our goals at The Adventure Junkies is to share our love of mountain biking. In this guide, we’ll help you increase your speed and agility to get the most out of your mountain bike.

There are many components to mountain bike training. Trainable skills include aerobic fitness, strength, balance and agility, technique and mental fortitude.

FITNESS TRAINING

Being physically fit and healthy will improve every aspect of your mountain biking skills, ranging from simple riding to complex skills. While just going out and mountain biking will improve your fitness, there are other techniques you can use to vary your routine or squeeze in extra training time.

CROSS-TRAINING

Why cross-train? First, no single sport works every muscle group or skill. Second, too much of the same thing can become boring or even cause repetition injuries. If you’re recovering from overuse or looking to mix it up, try some of these other activities.

ROAD BIKING

Road biking and mountain biking have a lot in common, and practicing one can improve the other. Outside of technique, the biggest difference is endurance.

Road cycling tends to consist of long, steady efforts. Mountain biking is more staccato. A short, intense, effort followed by several minutes of easier flow. This builds muscle, but not endurance.

These differences are explained on Training Peaks by mountain bike racer Mike Schultz. He created an easy-to-follow schedule of road bike exercises to build off-road endurance.

RUNNING

Cycling is a great low-impact workout, but this can cause other problems. The New York Times reports cyclists have lower bone density than other athletes.

Bone density only increases from impact exercising, like running or weight-lifting. Long low-impact endurance efforts deplete minerals and strengths from the bone.

Thankfully, running is a great way to improve bone density, even for serious cyclists. Casual cyclists aren’t in any danger, but you may want to incorporate running into your training. Fitness blog Breaking Muscle has a great running workout to help any cyclist improve their power and fitness.

SWIMMING

If you need an off-season sport, swimming is a great contender. Swimming involves the whole body, can be aerobic or anaerobic and can be done easily indoors. The low impact lets you do it even if you have other injuries, and it’s a great way to build endurance with long, steady efforts.

Wiggle, the British sports retailer, offers a full range of training programs and plans for cyclists looking to swim.

STRENGTH TRAINING

Fitness training will help you spin the pedals quicker in easier gears, but strength training will help you turn the harder gears. This will make it easier to mash up a climb or race across a flat.

WEIGHTED EXERCISES

Mountain biking requires upper and lower body strength. The riding is jarring, and impacts will be absorbed by muscle groups throughout your body. Furthermore, you’ll need to lift and pull a 30- to 35-pound bike up and down the trails.

According to James Wilson, mountain bike coach and trainer, most mountain bikers make the mistake of doing too many repetitions with light weights for their training. He recorded a podcast explaining why you should be doing five or less repetitions for strength training.

For more detailed exercises, the team at Bodybuilding.com has broken down exercises for each type of mtb rider. In addition to theory, they’ve provided several example routines to help you get started.

BODY WEIGHT EXERCISES

If you don’t belong to a gym or want to invest in weights, you can still get stronger. Strength training doesn’t just improve climbing, though. It can also be used to increase your downhill speed.

In the following video from Global Mountain Biking Network, racer Scott Laughland demonstrates seven body weight exercises you can do to improve your descending.

VIDEO: 7 BODY WEIGHT EXERCISES TO MAKE YOU A FASTER DESCENDER

For another take on body weight strength training, see this article on Pink Bike, with a routine consisting of four exercises you may not have heard of before. The entire circuit is pretty quick and should be perfect for anyone trying to improve in their spare time.

CORE TRAINING

Different from most strength training, core training will strengthen the abdominal muscles, obliques, and laterals, improving overall stability. A stronger core will make you a more efficient and agile rider, and will even improve your recovery time from hard efforts.

According to this practical training guide from Bicycling, these are the most important muscles to train, and neglecting them will cause frustration and slowness.

Global Mountain Bike Network has a 6-minute workout, explained in the following video. You can follow their workout to improve your core, without equipment, in the comfort of home.

VIDEO: CORE STRENGTH WORKOUT: 6 MINUTE CORE TRAINING FOR MOUNTAIN BIKING

MENTAL TOUGHNESS

Physical training is important, but most coaches rate mental toughness as being the deciding factor for elite athletes. Sandy Gordon, a professor of sports and exercise psychology, explains the concept in a short interview with the British Psychological Society.

MENTAL TOUGHNESS IN SPORT

A new study has confirmed the theory, showing how several minutes of meditation and mindfulness per day give athletes an edge in competition. Writing on Entrepreneur, former NFL linebacker Matt Mayberry shares his two techniques for building mental toughness.

The BBC has an in-depth series on mental resilience and sports performance, presented via their iWonder platform. The program offers practical tips and theory, and explores the brain differences between elite athletes and regular folks.

FUNDAMENTALS

You’ve probably grasped the fundamentals by now, but they can always be improved. Cornering, shifting, braking; these basic skills are a crucial factor in your overall speed, and it’s easy to develop bad habits that will slow you down over time.

CORNERING

The MTBProject has an incredibly detailed article on cornering, with a series of drills that will make you turn like a pro. The best part is you can do these drills anywhere, even in your driveway.

For an on-trail demonstration, Bike Radar recorded a video with skills training company Pedal Progression.

VIDEO: FASTER CORNERING – MTB SKILLS

SHIFTING

Most new riders use the wrong gears when they climb, and improving your shifting might be the single greatest improvement you can make when climbing. Bicycling has a guide to smart shifting, walking through a number of scenarios, to help you improve this skill.

Keep these scenarios in mind on every ride, and ride the same hills, noting how you fare in different gears. Get used to feeling how the bike shifts in different situations, and strive to shift smoothly and efficiently, and you should make big gains.

BRAKING

Efficiency is crucial for mountain biking, and braking is the technique where we sacrifice most of our efficiency. According to Singletracks.com, it’s one of the most overlooked techniques in the repertoire of mountain bikers.

VIDEO: MOUNTAIN BIKE BRAKING TECHNIQUE – BRAKING WITH LESS DIVE

ADVANCED TECHNICAL SKILLS

Technical skills encompass an assortment of practices and techniques. Weighting, unweighting, bunny hopping and pumping are a few we’ve written about.

See our beginner’s guide for the basics of weighting, which will improve how you turn corners. We also have a dedicated guide to bunny hopping to skip obstacles and another for pumping. The last technique turns obstacles into speed boosts like a real-life Mario Kart game.

There are a lot of other techniques too. Practice the skills on this list from MTB Techniques whenever you ride. There are even some backyard drills you can do before you hit the trails.

VIDEO: HOW TO MOUNTAIN BIKE BETTER – 5 BACKYARD DRILLS FOR AWESOME MTB SKILLS

HAVE FUN

The best way to keep improving on a mountain bike is to have fun riding. If you enjoy the sport, you’ll work harder and make the most of your time.

Ride with friends, especially ones who are better than you, and solicit advice, tips, and tricks. Most of all, make it an adventure. Go outside your comfort zone and skip grinding repetition. You’ll find you enjoy it more when you keep seeking new challenges, new trails and new adventures.

The post MTB Training – A Beginners Guide appeared first on The Adventure Junkies.

Here at The Adventure Junkies, we’re committed to offering our readers in-depth information about all things outdoors. Lucky for you, this is the right place to pick up tips that could help solve your mountain biking woes. Get ready as this article offers a bunch of useful advice about stretching for mountain bikers. We also discuss why it’s so important to stretch.

WHY STRETCHING FOR MOUNTAIN BIKERS IS SO IMPORTANT

Mountain biking is a pretty intense sport. From extended mental focus to exhausting muscle use, it requires a lot from the human body. In fact, it works out the entire body. If you want to go mountain biking, you’ll need endurance, determination, balance and core strength.

Moreover, the way your body is positioned on the bike results in your legs neither being fully bent nor extended. Your knee joints are never taken to their entire range of motion, as noted by Bike Radar. This is also why it’s important to set the mountain bike seat height properly. Mountain biking is one of the handful of sports where muscles contract only concentrically (shortening) and not eccentrically (lengthening).

The rest of your body, except for your arms and head, barely move at all when mountain biking. Instead, these parts stay in the same position for long periods of time which may cause stress as well.

All these things require you to take proper care of your muscles before, after and sometimes even during your ride. Stiff joints and muscles will eventually result in injuries, as shared by Stretch Coach. So, logically, you are able to reduce your chance of getting injured by stretching.

Stretching is a key aspect of warm up and cool down exercises, so it shouldn’t be skipped. You’ll find an overview of the best exercises for stretching for mountain bikers below.

7 MOUNTAIN BIKING STRETCHING EXERCISES

The following stretches for mountain bikers focus on the lower body, particularly the muscles used most often and most intensively. There are also a couple of exercises for the joints in the upper body.

Always make sure to stretch after a gentle warm up exercise. Stretching cold muscles is a bad idea because these are more prone to tearing and getting pulled. A light jog, laid-back bike ride or other cardiovascular activities could easily get your muscles warmed up.

CALVES

The classic calf stretch is used in various sports and is one of the most well-known stretching exercises. This is how to do it.

Face a wall with your toes pointing toward it. Place the palms of your hands on the wall at shoulder height. Stick one leg out behind you and put that foot flat on the ground. This leg should be kept straight. Take a small step forward with the other leg and put the foot flat on the ground as well. This other leg should be bent. Make sure your toes are pointing toward the wall.

Now, slowly lean forward but keep your upper body and back leg straight. You should feel the stretch in the big muscle of your calf. If you don’t feel much, you can try to push against the wall with your hands. Throughout this exercise, make sure that your upper body remains straight all the time. Hold the stretch for a minimum of 15 seconds. Then, switch the positions of your legs and repeat the exercise.

ACHILLES TENDON

The Achilles tendon is the long tendon that connects your heel to your calf muscle. This is one of the most important (and vulnerable) tendons in your leg, if not in your whole body. It’s used constantly not only while walking but also biking. However, the difference is that walking is a varied activity while pedaling a bike is a monotonous movement. You need to make sure your legs are prepared and strengthened.

Although tendons can’t stretch like muscles as they don’t contract and extend, you can stretch them and the area around them a little bit. Simply stand on a raised object such as a sidewalk or stairs. Put the ball of your foot on the edge of the object. Slightly bend your knee and drop your heel down to the floor. You’ll feel a slight stretch in your heel and your calf. Hold the stretch for 15 seconds and switch legs.

QUADRICEPS

The quadriceps is the biggest muscle in your body. It is also the most used muscle when cycling. Everyone who experienced biking uphill has felt the burn in their quads. This is why it’s important to stretch this huge muscle properly.

Quad stretching for mountain bikers is easy, though. Stand up straight and reach back to grab your foot, either one, above the ankle. Lift your lower leg backward to reach it. Once you’ve grabbed your ankle, pull it toward your butt. Take your time for this stretching exercise. It’s an important one. Hold the stretch for 15 to 30 seconds before changing legs.

HAMSTRINGS

Because of the cyclical motion of pedaling a bike, cyclists, including mountain bikers, develop powerful but short hamstring muscles. Compared with runners, who typically have long hamstrings, cyclists may suffer from tightness in these particular muscles. It is clear that stretching your hamstrings is key to avoid injuries.

This stretching exercise is as easy as they come. Standing up, bend over forward at your waist. Let your hands and arms dangle down while slightly bending your knees outward. You don’t need to touch the ground to make this a good stretch. Just bend over as far as you can. You’ll feel the stretch in both your hamstrings at some point. Hold that position for at least 15 seconds.

IT BAND

Running down the side of your legs, the IT band is responsible for leg control and balance. For mountain bikers, it’s the section between the knee and hip that’s most used. Keeping the IT band flexible is important because it can cause knee problems and tendonitis if it’s inflamed or too tight.

Sit on a chair and put one of your legs across the knee of the other leg. As you gently push down on the knee of the raised leg, you should feel a stretch on the outer portion of that leg. Hold the stretch for 15 to 30 seconds and switch legs.

WRISTS

Your wrists absorb shocks while mountain biking, so it’s a good idea to loosen them up before you start your ride. Stick out your arms and position them parallel to the ground. Simply rotate your wrists clockwise and counterclockwise. Use one hand to pull the other upward and downward.

SHOULDERS AND NECK

Both paying attention to traffic and other mountain bikers as well as focusing on the trail demand a lot from your shoulder and neck muscles. Loosen them up in the same way you would loosen your wrists. Stand and gently let your head roll in a circle. Rotate several times in both directions.

Loosen your shoulders by shrugging and holding that shrugged position for five to 10 seconds. Repeat the movement a number of times.

The post Stretching For Mountain Bikers – A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on The Adventure Junkies.