Skill Check, Part Two
Practice these drills to ride faster, smarter and safer.
Drill it like Amanda! Photo: Connor Macleod
By Amanda Nauman
@amanda_panda_
If you haven’t read it yet, part one of my Skill Check series outlines the foundational basics for safe and effective gravel bike handling. It’s a great starting point to grasp what I deem the ten most essential skills. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with those, and maybe even had a chance to incorporate them into your training, step two is doing some drills to reinforce these skills. Many of these can be done wherever there is grass or open space. I’ve presented them in an order that progresses from drills you can do on a grassy patch at a local park or in your front yard, to drills you will do on trails.
Drill: Bottle Hop
How: Put a bottle down horizontally in the grass or dirt. Use this as your pretend foreign object that you need to safely get over with your bike. Start by shifting your weight back to pick up the front wheel. Then shift your weight forward to pick up the back wheel. Gain an understanding of this teetering feeling while in the grass at a low speed, then approach at different speeds.
Why: To learn how to avoid branches or objects (rogue water bottle!) on the trail, and to safely roll over a curb. This will also help prevent pinch-flatting or denting the rim of your wheel by avoiding contact with these things.
Drill: The Dismount
How: Place a bottle sitting up in the grass or dirt. Use this as your obstacle that’s too tall to hop over, but just tall enough that you need to get off your bike. Start by riding towards the bottle and gauging when you need to start slowing down. Take note of your breaking power and how your tires respond to the terrain. Once you’re comfortable with braking towards the bottle, start practicing either a full stop and dismount or a rolling dismount. If you’re not comfortable swinging a leg over the back of the frame yet, you can start with making a full stop and getting off as quickly as possible. Gradually work up to swinging your leg behind the frame and dismounting while rolling.
Why: This skill will help prevent injuries and allow you to respond quickly when startled by objects, people, fences, stairs, bridges, or anything else in the way of your forward momentum.
Drill: One-hander
How: This requires you to practice riding with one hand on your bars. Once you’re comfortable on smooth surfaces, practice on bumpier roads so you know the feeling. Remember to wrap your thumb around the bar so you have a firm grip. Don’t forget to alternate hands and take note of how your bike handles if you need to grab one of the brakes one-handed.
Why: Riding on bumpy terrain and reaching down to grab a bottle to drink from or reaching for food from your back pocket. Many people feel uncomfortable trying to ride with one hand and eating or drinking at the same time, so this is an important skill to practice.
Practice the One-hander Drill for added confidence when greeting trail friends. Photo: Jason Ebberts
Bottle Pickup
How: Put a bottle down vertically in the grass or dirt. The goal is to ride by with one hand on the bars and try to reach down to pick up the bottle. This will force an understanding of your center of gravity and how to weight yourself around different areas of your bike position.
Why: It’s an extension of comfort for riding with one hand on the bars and also teaches you how to be comfortable with shifting weight on the bike. This is important if you’re avoiding sudden obstacles coming at you laterally and need to shift from side to side without tipping over.
Bike Carry and Push
How: There is no “right” way to do this, you just need to find what’s best for your size frame. You can put the inside of the triangle or the nose of the saddle on your shoulder. If you’re unable to carry the frame for whatever reason (height, weight, bottle cages), then practice different hand positions for pushing your bike along.
Why: In many gravel events or on any mixed surface ride, there will come a time where you need to carry your bike or walk while pushing it. Knowing how best to carry your bike based on your height, how heavy it is, how strong you are, and other factors will prevent you from hurting yourself if you do it the wrong way in the heat of the moment. In some instances, you will be forced to push your bike, and knowing where to put your hands and how to avoid running into your pedal is important (your shins will thank you!).
The right way to carry your bike is the most comfortable way—for you. Photo: Peter Morning
Standing Pedal
How: If you cannot pedal without your butt on the saddle, you must practice this. Start by riding on a flatter surface or grass so you feel how the body responds to the increased weight on the handlebars and shifted center of gravity. If you can do this on flat terrain, use this drill to practice standing on steeper grades. Pedaling over a steep dirt hill forces you to weight your body differently while keeping the gears spinning. If you lean too far forward you risk spinning the rear wheel without grip, so you must practice finding the sweet spot.
Why: You need to get on top of the pedals to put more power out over a hill or to match an acceleration. Standing allows you to use different muscle groups, so this is also good when you need to stretch the back.
Shifting Practice
How: Find a little hill or riser in the road and practice going into it at different speeds. This will show you how quickly your derailleur shifts and what sort of load it’s able to handle. For example, you want a gradual shift into an easier gear at the bottom of the hill instead of throwing three gears at once while exerting enormous power and risking a chain slip or break. You will sense when to shift your gears during a pedal stroke to match the terrain and how the chain dances up or down the cassette.
Why: When the grades continuously shift, you must be prepared to work with your gears and move along efficiently.
What goes up must come down…so practice descending efficiently and safely! Photo: Connor Macleod
Cornering
How: The fundamentals of cornering apply to the gravel bike, however with the added variable of the dirt consistency coupled with your tires. Find a tree, signpost, or other object that you can practice cornering around. If you’re on a trail, find a sharp corner that you want to practice. Begin to break before the turn, keep your weight on the outside of the bike with outside pedal down and weighted. To expand on this and push your limits, learn how the tread of your tires responds with certain tire pressures, and build on this with increasing speeds. Remember to practice left and right-hand turns because you have a dominant side.
Why: This will help with every single turn you ever do. You can prevent sliding out on corners with an understanding of the harmony between your brakes, tires, speed and the ground.
Descending
How: Use a descent that’s familiar to you. Look ahead to where you want to go. Roll into the descent and move your center of gravity back. A good reference is to get behind your saddle based on the steepness of the descent. The more you can take the weight off the front wheel, the better the bike will roll along underneath you. Practice this by entering at different speeds to feel how much front and rear brake you need to modulate to a comfortable descending speed.
Why: If you roll up to a sudden tricky descent, you will be able to react quickly. The faster you can lean back and put weight behind the bottom bracket, the less likely you will go over the handlebars. (Trust me and my missing front tooth!)
I hope you find these drills useful! To conclude, I want to share a quick edit of a steep little hill at a trail near me. I have a hard time with steep pitches like this, and was practicing riding over it. This forces me to look ahead, find the right speed to approach the hill, feel the correct shifting pattern to pedal over it, know how my weight needs to shift, gauge whether to stand or sit, safely get over the concrete edge, and then quickly roll down the descent safely to repeat it all over again. If you add some of the bottle drills before this, throw in a turn at the bottom, and mix in the dismounting and carry drills with this hill, then you have a nice little drill session to refine your skills. Go out there and invest some time in your safe bike handling!
Amanda "The Panda" Nauman can often be found racing on two wheels somewhere in the gravel or mud. An affinity for the dirt led her to multiple UCI podiums, World Cup appearances, and a brush with the European racing scene in cyclocross. This cx-savvy panda also plays on mountain bikes and racks up the miles on gravel bikes around the country when she's not at work. The two-time champion of the DK 200 isn't afraid to push the limits at endurance events and balance out the racing with long, epic adventure rides. As co-founder of the Mammoth Tuff gravel event, she continues to work towards welcoming riders to this gravel community and inspiring adventure.
