Cycling Skills For Aspiring Racers
Level up your bike skills to tackle your next race
I've been an assistant coach for a high school cross country mountain bike team for a few years now, and a consistent challenge I've seen is how to assess a riders skills, and how to help them develop a plan for progress.
National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) has some great coach training, which helps provide the language for consistent instruction of various techniques, but I've never seen a framework that lays out the essential skills a rider needs to develop to be a competent bike racer.
I put this framework together to capture the broad set of skills that riders need to be successful. Reading through this, keep a mental note of which category you feel you are in for each skill. That will help you build an action plan for improvement. There are a million great bike handling skill videos online, so I won't get into any specific advice here beyond the framework.
While this framework was written for mountain bike racing, most of this applies equally well to gravel racing and even road racing.
Bike Racing Skills
Level up and enjoy your next race!
