In this free BMX grinding video lesson an expert will discuss and demonstrate how to do grind down a slope on a bmx bike.
Garson Fields is 20 years old. He has been riding BMX and mountain bikes for seven years and shown many others how to as well. He represents Full Circle Bike Shop out of Florence, MA.
While your best bet while learning a lot of those ride tricks is doing them on a flat ledge or something like that. Eventually you are probably going to want to take them to a downslope ledge via ledge downstairs, via a ledge at the skate park or something like that. More or less it is the same thing but there is a couple of considerable differences I should mention while I am talking about it. The main thing that a ledge that goes down on something, don't forget you are going to gain speed as you go down it. If you come absolutely flying into a ledge that is down a big set of stairs or something. Especially something that has already been waxed, you are going to end up going even faster at the bottom and a lot of times you are going to end up out of control if you are doing that and you really don't want to do that. So instead you are generally better off going a little bit slower at a ledge downstairs or some sort of downstairs ledge because you are going to find that you will carry speed better. You don't need to worry about losing speed throughout the trick and if you want maintain control throughout the trick, starting off a little slower is usually a pretty good way to go. Sometimes you are going to need that little bit of extra speed for something sticky or if you are trying to go a little far something like that. Generally go a little bit slower than a little bit faster. Better safe than sorry. Another thing to consider is that some tricks are better down ledges; feeble pegs and double pegs being the two notable ones in my book. I find that because you don't have to go in them as fast and you can actually maintain your momentum a little bit easily. You have a little more time focusing on balancing and once you get down to the end, it makes usually makes pulling off the ledges a little bit easier because you are going a little bit faster which in general those two will go hand in hand. One trick that is a little bit harder down a slanted ledge that I talked about is a smith grind. Part of that reason being is you are already in a position where your front wheels are a little bit higher than your back wheels. So if you are going to start going into a smith grind down a steep ledge all of a sudden you are that much farther into the front end. It is certainly a difficult trick; something very impressive but at the same time you just want to make sure you are not going to and get yourself in over your head with that. Another thing to mention with smith grind if you are on a down slope ledge, you are going to have to pull off of it harder. You are going to have to lean back to get your front end up higher to land smoothly. You know it's not a problem. Something you should play around with on a downslope ledge that isn't too steep. Just something you can get the sensation of doing that and once you get that figured out, you can take it to all the big scary ledges that you like and put all of your grinding skills to the test.
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