Tips for Brake Use in Mountain Biking Cornering

Video Transcript

MICKEY DENONCOURT: Knowing when and how to brake makes all the difference in the world. If you brake in a corner, you can't corner and brake to your maximum capacity, you're making compromises. You only have a finite amount of traction and when it's going in different directions, different vectors instead of going in the way you want to go, you're going to get pulled off in some tangential vector. So what I'm going to do? I'm just going to walk up here a little bit, I'm going to do all my braking before I get to this corner and ride through it then I'm going to walk back up, and I'm going to brake during the corner and watch the difference. Okay, I just did all my braking before the corner, I'm going really slow, this is a much, much faster corner but I think you're going to get the idea of what's going on when I start to brake in the corner here. So, I brake real hard in the middle of the corner and instead of continuing to go through the corner in the nice natural arc, my bike loses traction, I start going off the hill. As you're going faster on harder corners, its way more receptible and noticeable and I have to exaggerate for the purposes of this demonstration. But basically, you want to do your cornering before you get to the corner in almost all circumstances, there are some rare exceptions I'll talk about later. Your front brake does almost all of your slowing down, when you're going in a straight line, you want to use your front brake. Back brake helps to brake the back end of the bike loose so you can get around tighter corners, you want to use it sparingly though. When you're in a corner, it's probably best to maybe only use your back brake 'cause using your front brake really causes you to wash out more because so much of your cornering is due to your front tire.

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