Learn how and why you should be cautious about the surfaces you are grinding before you do it in this free instructional video lesson on BMX grinding and peg tricks.
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.
Another important aspect of doing grinds is checking out the surface that it is that you are grinding on. For something like this set up that we have here, behind me it is a basic skate park ledge, something pretty slick and it's been waxed a bunch of times so that is really you are not going to have to worry about losing speed too much or sticking to anything because it is really intended for that purpose. For you street riders out there, a lot of times you are going to find that you will find a ledge that you want to grind or a rail or something like that that is a little less optimal in these perfect skate park conditions. You know an unwaxed cement ledge for example is going to grind a lot slower than a waxed skate park rail. So one of the things you want to keep in mind is you want to check what it is that you are riding before you come hauling full bore in at it and start trying to slide it. If this is not normally as much of an issue if you are doing a feeble ride because even if you do stick, you are just going to slow down a whole bunch. It comes an issue with smith grinds and double pegs mostly because all of a sudden you are putting down your front peg which doesn't roll quite obviously and if it sticks and especially with a smith grind where you are already over a front end, if it sticks and you are not properly unweighting your front end, it will just stop and shoot you over the handle bars. You want to make sure that you try to avoid doing that as much as possible. The moral of the story is that you always want to check out what it is that you are grinding because even sometimes by looking at it, you won't be able to tell. Go up to the ledge and slide your pegs around it. It is also important with rails because an aluminum rail is not going to slide really as well as a steel rail and if all of a sudden you find yourself jumping onto a big aluminum hand rail while you are out on a street ride and your front pegs sticks, that situation can get ugly really quickly. So basically just make sure that you know what it is you are grinding on. The surfaces because that is really important in determining how fast you want to go, how much do you want to be weighting your bike and your body. Go out there and experiment with all that stuff. Try to ride all sorts of different obstacles and have fun.
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