Technique: Footwork fundamentals

Get the fundamentals right, and you’ll be smoother, faster and more controlled (Joby Sessions)

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The position of your feet can make the difference between roosting safely off tricky drops and landing it, and getting into a bloody, tangly mess. Good footwork is not only efficient and balanced; it feels great. The first in a new series about the fundamental elements of mountain biking, here's why footwork is so important.

The forces that move between body and bike can be enormous. From the centrifugal action of a high-speed corner to the thrust of body into bike as you grab the brakes – how you manage these forces has a massive impact on the quality of your ride.

It makes sense to think about footwork for this very reason. Your legs are far more powerful than your arms, so you need to manage the energy through them wherever possible. They provide the force to drive you uphill and the strength to stop you at the bottom.

Top tips for effective footwork

• Spin to win: If you’re a grinder on the hills, pumping a big gear at low revs, it might be hard to convert to spinning at 80rpm. Cries of “I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere” or “I like something to push against” are the most common. Be persistent. 
• Measure your cadence and spin those pedals for a month before you write the method off — you’ll probably find yourself lasting longer and going further than you expected.

• Stretch out: Good footwork relies on a flexible lower body, so make sure you take time to stretch after every ride.
• Hamstrings and calf muscles tend to become tighter and shorter through regular cycling, making it harder to get your heels down, and harder to spin smoothly and quickly on the climbs. Stretch both, and glutes too, for good lower-body flexibility and performance.

• Chest down: Move to the nose of the saddle and drop your chest forward — this will keep your front wheel tracking straight.
• Prepare for power: Be ready to surge on the pedals in order to clear objects such as rocks or roots.
• Pull the bars: Pull back and down on the bars to give extra directional stability, and use your upper body to help power the bike up short, steep sections of trail.

• Watch your knee: Set your saddle height to allow a slight flex in the knee at the bottom of the pedal stroke, but ensure that your heel is right down when you do this. The result is a position much lower than many XC riders are used to, but allows better footwork when descending.
• Drop your heels: By lowering your saddle and dropping your heels on climbs, you get a similar power output to riders who climb on their toes with a higher saddle.

Now we’ll look at foot positioning required for performing specific actions, such as cornering, braking, descending, and climbing and some essential set-up tips for fine-tuning your technique.

Corner smooth and fast

Getting through a corner with style and speed depends on lots of things coming together. Here we’ll just focus on the footwork – before, during and after the turn.

As you come into the bend, drop your outside foot and push your weight into it. This puts all the force of your body through the lowest possible point on the bike (make sure you don’t sit down), giving maximum stability.

In rocky or shallow corners you might not drop the foot to the very bottom – allowing some flex in the knee to absorb uneven terrain in the turn.

By moving your weight low, you also change the way the bike performs if the tyres lose traction.

If your weight is high (e.g. when sitting down) and the tyres slip out, the top of the bike will quickly hit the ground – and you with it. With weight kept below the wheel axles, the bike won’t go flat so quickly – it’ll drift sideways instead.

As soon as you start to exit the corner, you bring your feet back to level and get ready to start pedalling. 

At this point, make sure your steering is even with no snatches on the bar – good footwork provides great balance, but you also need even, controlled steering to bring your corner to a smooth, fast finish.

Five steps for correct cornering footwork

1. Spot the corner:  Ride with your cranks level to begin with, then start to drop the weight onto the outside foot as the corner approaches.

2. Push through your foot: Once you’re in the turn, put your weight down through the outside foot, letting the bike lean beneath you. This gives extra grip to the tyres and lowers your centre of gravity for enhanced control.

3. Drop your heel: Smoother terrain and full suspension allow the outside foot to go almost all the way down, with the heel lower than the toe to avoid the foot bouncing off the pedal.

4. Flex your knee: To absorb impacts in rocky or shallow corners, you need to reduce the drop of your foot, allowing the knee to bend and soak up the bike’s movement.

5. Exit the corner: Your pedals come back to a level position again as you exit the corner and get ready to power away.

If you’re racing or riding hard, you need to brake as late as possible, so follow the procedure above, stand up on the pedals, drop your heels, sink your weight back and grab the brakes as late as possible. With good footwork, your body position and balance won’t be affected as you hit the start of the corner.

Foot position and braking forces

When you grab the brake levers, the first thing that happens is the bike’s wheels spin more slowly and the bike slows down.

But in that instant, your body is still pushing forward, and something has to stop it. With only four contact points between body and bike, it’s down to your hands and feet to absorb this momentum.

If your feet are level, it’s likely that a lot of the momentum will go through your hands and into the handlebars.

This causes several problems: 

• First - the twisting force that tries to rotate the bike forwards and over the front wheel, making it less stable.
• Second - the impact on body position as you get pushed forward when you may not want to be there.
• Third  - with all this force going through your arms, you’ll find steering and controlling the bike is heavy work.

The solution is simple – ride downhill with your heels down, body slightly up and back from the saddle, and if you brake hard, then sink your heels lower. This directs all the force of your body through your feet. If you’ve never tried this before, the result will be a revelation.

All the momentum is now through the bottom bracket of the bike, so there’s no feeling of being pushed forwards or the bike tipping. Furthermore, your arms are under less pressure, so you can steer, brake and control the bike more easily.

Control your descents with your heels

As rider and bike flow down the trail, you need to be prepared for every lump, bump, rock or drop. The less effect these have on your balance and bike control, the faster you can ride them. Keeping your heels down has a big impact here.

Each time your bike drops or hits a rock it decelerates, and your weight gets pushed forwards.

With your heels down you can absorb that push through flexed legs, so your body position remains unchanged, you’re not pushed over the bars and steering is unaffected.

It’s a similar story for bumps, roots and larger drops – if your heels are down, you can absorb the impact through flexed ankles, and if you’re using flat pedals you’re less likely to lose them from under your feet, too.

There are other benefits to the heels-down position. Think of your feet, legs, body, arms and bike as being part of one complete circle. Pull one part of the circle in a different direction and everything else is affected.

As your heels come down, it encourages you to sink back into the bike, allowing you to raise the brake levers and encouraging you to look further ahead, instead of down.

Raising levers makes smooth, pumped manuals easy and natural, and with the bike a little further in front of your body now it’s easier than ever to push the feet forward, with heels down, to manual, hop and drop.

Four technique tips for controlling your descents

1. Drop Your Hips. Move your hips backwards and down as braking pressure increases. This pushes more of your body force through the pedals instead of the bars.

2. Eyes Up. Look ahead, not down, and trust your peripheral vision to let you know what’s happening beneath your front wheel.

3. Lever Position. Setting your brake levers fairly high lets you drop lower on the bike, thus improving your balance, encouraging a heads-up body position, and preparing you for powerful pumped manuals.

4. Drop Your Heels. Keeping your cranks level and heels dropped low enables you to absorb braking force through your feet, leaving your arms relaxed and better able to control the bike.

Blast the climbs

Footwork is also about how you spin your pedals to climb, and how you use your pedalling forces to keep traction.

Spin your pedals: First we need to get cadence right – the rate at which you turn your cranks. If you look at professional road riders, most will be spinning at between 90 and 110 revolutions per minute (rpm). Lance Armstrong was faster still – about 120rpm.

The idea is to avoid fatigue by minimising your use of fast-twitch fibres (which provide lots of power but tire quickly) and working your slow-twitch fibres as much as possible (which work well for long periods of time, but only with good oxygen supply). 

Most people have an equal number of each fibre type in their muscles, so the key to big rides is spinning smoothly  with limited bursts of power to help you keep going without serious fatigue.

There’s a catch for mountain bikers – sometimes we have to clear a step-up, a rooty section or a sudden steep incline as part of a climb. Often there’s no time to change gears, so you have to accelerate in the gear you’re already using. 

By training yourself to spin at 70-80rpm, you can leave room to accelerate up to 100rpm without feeling like your legs are going to spin off.

Get some traction action: The heels-down idea also works for slippery or loose climbs. If you look at the way we bunny-hop with flat pedals – by scooping up the back foot with toes pointing down – you realise that if you climb that way you’re unweighting the back of the bike if you scoop up at the back of the pedal stroke.

Pedal through the heels, let them sink lower than your toes at the bottom of the stroke, and then just come back to level as the foot comes up. This gives better traction, especially if you’re spinning well at the same time.

Set-up tips: making it easier to fine-tune your footwork technique

Focus with flats:  Riding with SPD pedals can make your footwork sloppy, because you never have the pain of sliding off the front of the pedal and cracking your shin. 

But the flow of force is the same whether you use flat pedals or SPDs, and bad footwork still has a major effect, so it’s worth swapping to flats for a while if you want to fine-tune your riding. 

You may find yourself getting bounced off them at first, but this is usually short-lived as your technique improves. When you switch back to SPDs your riding will move on rapidly.

Dropping the saddle: Many riders are tempted to raise their saddle for maximum efficiency on long rides or big climbs. In the end, you can find yourself with toes down as you come to the bottom of the pedal stroke, with tight calves and a saddle so high you can barely get off the back. 

So try dropping the saddle. If you then drop your heels at the bottom of the pedal stroke you get the same leg extension, so you don’t lose any power. But you can also descend better and get off the back more easily in severe terrain, while keeping your heels down for maximum control.

Good footwork will make you smoother and more confident.

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