Team Wideopenmag’s Chris Hutchens has taken the opportunity over the off-season to weed out the bad habits and quantify where he can improve with Morrocco Media’s video technology.
It doesn’t matter how god you think you are at riding, there is always room for improvement. Chris Hutchens headed out for a day of back-to-back runs with local rider Joe Connell to compare and contrast their riding styles.
Chris says …
In 2015 and the start of 2016 I worked closely with Morrocco Media using some hugely impressive video analysis techniques along with fancy GPS units. I love this sort of thing and working with Stefan, owner and brains behind this exciting company is always great.
Fast forward 12 months from my first session with Stefan he’s advanced his analysis approach and added some extra things in. If I’m honest it can be pretty hard to dissect your own riding but it’s definitely worth it. Although I learnt a huge amount throughout last winter it’s too easy to fall into bad habits and technique. I definitely tried to incorporate what we had worked on in 2016 but mountain biking is a complex sport with so many things happening you often revert back to your old ways.
For 2017 I’m teaming up with Joe Connell who lives only an hour away and working together with Stefan to help squeeze some time out of our riding. As I delve into coaching more myself the sessions are super valuable and I’d love to see more people using this sort of technology in future. It’s so useful!
Back to basics
We literally went back to basics, something I think even the best riders should do sometimes. We identified some really interesting aspects of our riding that need improved on. Angles, body position, braking, lines. The list goes on.
Once we’d torn apart our riding on a fire road it was time to hit some trails. Once again this opened up a whole can of worms. Try this, try that and the head can get confused. Little changes are tough to make but we both started to make progress. Joe and I both have the same tendency to push our weight back in the middle for a corner. Not good for front wheel grip.
We were also able to gain a huge amount of data about our bike set-up, line choice and countless other aspects of our riding by using the Catapult device. Joe put in about 8 seconds into me down a 2 minute long track (home advantage maybe) but there data showed us some incredible stuff about what we and the bikes were doing.
