How a few simple tweaks to your mountain bike can boost your confidence

BikeRadar videographer Reuben Bakker-Dyos is a frighteningly powerful rider on the road and he’s recently taken up MTB. His bike choice was a racy, steep and twitchy hardtail — a Canyon Grand Canyon 29er — which, Reuben freely admits, “I tend to crash a lot.”

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“Because I crash a lot, I tend to have ‘The Fear’ when things get a bit gnarly,” adds Reuben, who clearly wants to conquer that fear.

While lots of crash footage may make for amusing viewing, we’d rather keep Reuben in one piece so we asked tech editor Jon Woodhouse to set him up with a similarly-priced full-suspension trail bike to see what a difference it made to his confidence.

At the end of the session we expected Reuben to say he was going to swap his Grand Canyon for something a bit more forgiving or, failing that, that he’d picked up a few ideas for his existing bike’s set-up that would give him the confidence to push a bit harder on the trails — but what did Reuben conclude? Check out the video to see how he got on.