Outdoors Talk

Mountain biking is a fantastic mix of fun and outdoor exercise. It’s suitable for everyone, regardless of age, gender, size, ability, experience or previous exercising history. What you need is a bike, helmet, and a bit of willingness.

If you’re going to do mountain biking, you should know what sort, so you can choose the appropriate bike. There are 4 main categories and they include cross country, downhill/freeride, all-mountain, and trials.

So what do you wanna do? Do you want to ride smooth flowing trails, stunts, downhill courses, climb mountains, or just have a bucket of fun. It’s your choice, but you do need to decide how will you spend time on your bike.

If you want to venture in the extreme venues of mountain biking then consider Freeride/Downhill bikes. They are made for extreme and intense riding. These bikes are heavy, durable, with full suspension and large disc brakes to help them stop during high speeds. Heavy, tough and very expensive.

If you’re looking for a bike to be fun in the largest number of situations, consider all-mountain bike. They come with front and rear suspension, full gear set and will take you almost anywhere.

If you’re looking for light and all-round efficient mountain bike, consider Cross-Country. These bikes are most suitable for the average mountain biker, who doesn’t go in the extremes. They are light, they offer full selection of gears (generally 27) and will do great for climbing up hills as going down.

Trial mountain bikes don’t look anything like mountain bikes. They have smaller, lower frames and some types come without a saddle. They’re set up specifically for bike trials.

OK, so you know what type of mountain bike you want, but which brand to choose, there are so many? I myself prefer Iron Horse, but brand name is really not very important here. You should look at the quality of the components. How sturdy is the frame, how good is suspension and brakes and so on. That is what is important.

Just remember, a bike is a sum of its parts. Now go out there and enjoy the ride.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 6:34 am and is filed under exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.