USEFUL BEGINNER TECHNIQUES

1. Anchoring

This handy trick, when mastered, can massively amplify your stopping power. Immediately before braking, move your bodyweight rearward and lean back and down over the back wheel. Joe describes this position as “like your body is an anchor that’s digging into the ground.” As you do this, push down hard with your feet on the pedals and pull down on the grips with your hands. You’ll want to get your body so low that your bum is almost touching the rear tyre. Squeeze both brakes hard and your stopping distance should be more than halved. Balancing in this pose took me a few attempts, but once the bike has stopped you can easily hop down from the pedals. It’s worth trying this using the front and back brakes independently before applying both together. This gives a useful indication of how each brake affects the balance of the bike as well as how e ective it is at stopping it.

2. Lean it over

It took me a while for the process of leaning the bike over in corners to really ‘click’, but one of Joe’s little hacks that really helped was this exaggerated lean that you can do while stationary. Stand up tall on the pedals and extend one leg as far as you can sideways, away from the bike. Allow this leg to tip both you and the bike sideways, and land on it as your foot hits the ground. Bending your knee, continue to tip the bike down until the tip of the bar touches the ground. This exercise puts your body in the same position, relative to the bike, as you’d be in while cornering, letting you safely practise how to contort yourself into the right pose.