If you are looking for a new sport that is not common and is different from other kinds of sports running and playing basketball, riding electric mountain bikes could be the number one choice on your list.
Usually, this is what we call riding off-road, which serves as a kind of workout that can build up your confidence. However, as you are a rookie in the field of electric mountain bikes, there are a lot of things you have to focus on, including several common mistakes, just stick with us.
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Protection
This one is super important. There needs to be protection while you are riding an electric mountain bike. You don’t want to be wearing tracky bottoms, sandals, and a t-shirt. There is nothing wrong with that if you are going to the shops and stuff, but when you are on mountains and rocky terrain, you have to be highly protected out there and not hurt yourself.
We are going to start with the shoe. You can wear trainers that are going to give you a little bit of grip and keep you feel enclosed just in case you hit a rock. Another kind of protection is knee pads. When it comes to rough terrain, we highly recommend you to wear some knee pads just to protect your knees in case you fall off. And also, one of the most important protection is a helmet. An open-face helmet is enough, but if you feel very intimidated when first riding on an e-mountain bike, you could wear a full-face helmet in case a little rock or something else smashes your face when you hit a high speed.
Know Your Limits
When you are a beginner, you don’t just want to go and ride the hardest trails out there. Maybe you are watching all that social media and thinking that it is a piece of cake, but the truth is not.
We just feel like you should just take a chill pill and ride within your comfort zone but maybe a little bit out of it as it’s always a great thing to venture out of that comfort zone because your progression happens there.
Confidence
Confidence is great and inspiring, but being too confident can hurt you. When it comes to running a trail where you can see there is a jump just down there, if you are like “I can do it” and haven’t quite worked on those skills, it can be dangerous. Therefore, being too confident is not as good as you think. Of course, it is a key factor that helps you make progress on electric mountain biking, but as you know that things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme. Therefore, if you are a beginner, just bring your confidence, bring it down a notch.
Riding Position
Rookies for electric mountain bikes tend to sit down a lot on the trail. If it is not a Sunday stroll, and you are not really going to the shops but are riding electric mountain bikes on mountain trails, you don’t want to be sitting down because when you sit down, you will get all your energy down on your ebike and feel like you are going to get bucked and pushed over the bars, to be simple, the right way is to stand up. Also, you can lower your saddle a little bit, just to get away from your butt. If that saddle hits in the bum, it’s going to send you over the bars and you will have that horrible feeling where your weight is transferred over the front.
Crank Arm Position
We’ve seen it a number of times from our customers that when they are riding their electric bikes, the pedals are down. The angle of both pedals is like 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock, but the right angle should be 9 and 3 o’clock. That’s because when you are running 12 and 6 o’clock down, one of your feet will be so close to the ground where all those rocks, boulders, and stumps can catch a pedal and stop you, even worse than that, throwing you off the trail or the ebikes.
Gear Selection
Most beginners don’t really like to climb with electric mountain bikes because there is so much effort. When you are climbing and changing gears on roads, your electric mountain bikes are going to sound like it’s crying, which is disgusting. When you want to change gear on the road, just lighten off the power a little bit, then click the gears to let it shift gently because changing gears on the road can potentially snap your chain.
On the cassette of ebikes, when you are changing gears, there are loads of little bits that help ramp the chain up to the gear, if you change where there isn’t one, it’s going to just force it back up onto the gear that you’ve selected, causing the chain to jump and make the horrible noise which could potentially snap your chain. Also, it will shorten the life of your chain and damage the cassette. Therefore, make sure you are in the right gear when ascending steep hills.
Pedaling not pumping
We’ve seen a lot of emountain bikers pedaling wherever they go, but in fact, you don’t really need to pedal everywhere but use the terrain wisely to gain speed on the trail. You can use the turns and flow with ebikes. Don’t think you need to pedal everywhere because you can cause yourself to strike the ground especially when you are in a turn, or when it’s rough, of course sometimes you do need to pedal.
Everyone used to be a beginner when they start to do something new, including riding electric mountain bikes. Once you determine to do that, we believe you can get a lot of fun.