Avert the hurt!
Top coach Alan Milway explains how to lower your risk of getting injured and recover quicker
Riding bikes over rocks and roots at speed isn’t only exhilarating, it comes with risk. Crashes happen and can lead to injuries. For pro riders, this is part of the job. However, they’re often able to return to riding quite quickly – not necessarily because they’ve been seen by a top surgeon, but because recovery and rehabilitation are a key part of their training, and they take a diligent, focused approach to the process.
Amateur riders are at potentially higher risk of injury. When Gee Atherton jumps a seemingly crazy step-down, he’s spent weeks building it, walking it and practising for it, plus he’s been strength-training to resist the forces he’ll have to endure when riding it. If you’re sat in a car/office/factory most of the week, when the weekend comes and you want to ride the big jumps, there simply hasn’t been the preparation to stack the odds in your favour. There’s no way to ‘prevent’ yourself getting hurt, but by improving your skills, basic mobility, strength and fitness, you can give yourself a better chance of resisting serious injury.
‘Prevention’ (is better than cure)
Let’s be clear, the best and only way to prevent injury in mountain biking is to not mountain bike. It’s as simple and impractical as that. So, we can’t avoid injury, but we can try to reduce the likelihood of it happening and mitigate it when it does. Here are three practical measures you can take to do this, and they’ll have broader benefits, too:
1 Build your strength
Many crashes occur when sections are ridden at speed and the rider either gets bucked off-line or collapses over the bike on rough landings or over jumps. Improving your basic strength can help you maintain posture on the bike, and this can reduce some of these bigger crashes to less serious tumbles.
Fatigue plays havoc with concentration and also the way your muscles contract and relax
2 Improve your fitness
Fatigue plays havoc with concentration and also the way your muscles contract and relax. Long rides can build confidence but you may start to fatigue when riding at higher intensities, so be aware of this. Exercising during the week will pay dividends at the weekends, as your resilience and endurance will improve.
3 Park your ego!
This is one of the hardest things to do. Many riders have the confidence to try and ride sections at speed, but maybe not the skill, and the same applies to jumps. With bike parks having much bigger features now, it’s important to know where your skill level currently sits, and also to not try to do everything on the first run or even first visit.