Five Points Of Control

Miles highlights some very important and fundamental riding concepts.

I don’t spend much time on web forums. I don’t seem to have the time, and if I did, I don’t think I’d spend it reading the quantity and quality of what seems to be there. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather be doing something, like riding my bike or MTB instead.

How it happened

After originally being self-taught at the age of 10, then spending a couple of years at a mini bike club, I really learned to ride through Stephen Gall’s Academy Of Off Road Riding at the age of around 24. I was racing downhill mountain bikes professionally on the US and World Cup circuits and met Steve through our local road bicycle club racing Friday night criteriums (a great way to get fit and suffer like hell with heart rates over 205bpm).

After telling Gally I had a 250 motocross bike and was getting back into riding after 10 years off, he said I should come to his five-day camp at Dargle as a guest to take kids mountainbike riding in the morning before moto school, and to share information on what it takes to be a professional mountainbike rider…things like training, diet and so forth. After that I took part in the moto training as one of the regular punters.

It was the perfect foundation to becoming a proficient off-road rider. A few years later I got my qualifications and became one of the coaches.

Technique

One thing that sticks in my mind from the training was the concept of ‘The Five Points Of Traction’. Here they are in my approximate order of importance:

1. Body position (30%)

2. Control use (25%)

3. Line selection (20%)

4. Suspension (12.5%)

5. Tyres and tyre pressure (12.5%)

I can almost hear shrieks of horror from people who spend many hours of their life commenting about what they think is the best tyre and how it transforms their riding.