Traction - The Secret To Riding The Gnarly Stuff

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Traction! We all need it but it can be pretty elusive, especially when the terrain gets gnarly. Weighting your suspension is a great way to get traction. Think of the weight driving your nobbies into the ground. A situation where this would make sense would be when you’re about to ride up or over an obstacle that is super slippery. You’re going to want to weight your suspension and give it a burst of throttle before the obstacle where you can still find traction. Another situation would be where you’re at a stand still and when you try to get going, your rear wheel just wants to spin. Sometimes, weighting your suspension by pressing down on the foot peg, as you let out the clutch and give it some throttle will be enough to get you going again.

Another important part of maintaining your traction is keeping your feet on the pegs. As soon as your feet are out and touching the ground, you’re un-weighting your suspension. My rule of thumb if I need to dab a foot is to always at least keep my weight on one peg. You’ll see in my videos that I always make a good effort to do this, even if things are getting buck wild and I’m all over the place on the bike.

Your clutch is probably the most important tool you have for finding traction and reducing wheel spin. It’s going to take lots and lots of time on the bike to learn and understand this but it’s worth focusing on and putting time into. I’m not going to go into great detail in this video because this could be an entire video on it’s own. I will say though, that you need to realize that your clutch lever should rarely be all the way in or all the way out. You’ll need to learn where your engagement point is and practice feathering your clutch on that point. It’s when you let your clutch all the way out in a slippery situation that you will break traction and spin when you’re on the gas. You can see that when I’m not on the gas, my bike rolls forwards on the loose rocks without breaking traction. When I’m actually giving it throttle and I let my clutch out all the way, I break traction almost instantly and lose control. The trick is to learn to stay on that engagement point to control that wheels spin.