Scott Scudamore: Hi! My name is Scott Scudamore and we are teaching you how to ride a mountain bike with confidence. In this clip, we are going to talk about the vision and the relaxation and how your body is when you are on the bike. It is very important that you not look at the front wheel while you are riding. You want to kind of look as far ahead in the trail as comfortable and that also will slow the bike down a little bit. If your bike is not going slower, but by you looking forward it is slowing your trail down just a little bit.

You want to look ahead; if you see a big tree or if you see a big rock that you do not want to hit, you don't want to look at the rock, you do not want to look at the tree; you want to look ahead as to where you want to go. If you look where you don't want to go, unfortunately that is where you are going to go. So, it is very-very important that we are looking ahead of the trail and keeping that look ahead because if you are looking down at the wheel you are going to loose control of the bike. So, along those same lines, when you are riding on the bike we want to have our elbows slightly relaxed and bent, nice and comfortable.

We don't want a death grip on the handlebars; we want a nice, easy feel on the handlebars. We have our buts slightly off the saddle, kind of just going off and on the bike; we do not want to be way down on the saddle, just kind of nice and easy on the saddle and when we are coasting thought the trail, when we are not paddling, we want to have our paddles that we call the three o'clock and nine o'clock. So, you do not want to have the paddles up like this or like this; you want to have them leveled across the trail.

There is a couple of reasons for that; one, you are going to be able to have a nice, your balance is going to be better because you are going to have nice stable platform for both feet. It is going to be the same, but more importantly if you have got your paddles there, if you have obstacles on the trail that you are trying to avoid, if you have one paddle down and one paddle up, then one paddle down in wherever ways, it's going to hit that obstacle.

So, those were tips on vision, things you have to lookout when you are on the trail and things you do to keep your body nice and relaxed while you are riding your bike.