Do you want to push yourself to become a much bet-ter rider? Do you want to be able to compete with the people who have been riding at your local skate park for much longer than you? In this BMX arti-cle I will be telling you how to become a better rider.

Becoming a better BMX rider is something you will want to do if you have the drive to do it, some people buy a BMX, ride it for a few weeks and then when they find out they can’t do anything on it, give up. This is a very bad approach to take, not just on a BMX but in life generally. You should never give up because you cannot do some-thing, “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.”

With riding a BMX, and tricking it, practice is key. When learning tricks, you will never do them perfectly first time, you may do it, but it won’t be done well or look good. Keep practicing it until you can do it perfectly every time. Only then can you say you can do the trick.

One enormous factor in improving quickly is riding with others. For example, this weekend I went to a busy skate park twice, and learned more than I ever did riding ramps on my own. Other people who are better than you push you into doing more tricks, and even show you how to do them. Un-less you are trying something stupid, you won’t even break a bone if you fall, so there is nothing to worry about, is there?

Having confidence is the only way to try new tricks. You have to build up the courage to even try to do them before you do it, and this is the hardest bit about it. For example, the first time you ever drop in, you will be very scared, and while at the top of the ramp, will be thinking about all of the possibilities of things that can happen to you, eve-ryone does it. The key is to bypass these fears and go for it anyway, as long as you know how to do it, and have the skills to do it, chances are you will do it first time. And if you fall on your first time dropping in, you have built up the courage to try it once; from now on it is so much easier.

Before you even go to the skate park to try a new trick, just think about what you are going to do; do you know how to do it? How do you take off, land, spin? These are all things you need to know before attempting something, for example, trying your first high air out of a ramp, set-ting up is easy, ride fast at it, but what do you do when you are in the air? This is what you need to find out.

Spinning is one of the scariest, yet most reward-ing and good looking forms of tricks there is. They are very hard to learn, because if you don’t go for it first time, you are very likely to fall. Unlike with any other trick, you may not always be facing for-wards or backwards, trying spins can be uncontrol-lable when you start and are very difficult to control.

There are 3 parts to doing an air rotation, the spin initia-tion, the air control and the landing. Each of these parts needs its own explanation, although most of the spin is covered in parts 1 and 2. The thing that you need to remember when spinning is that even if you do fall, you can get up and try again. The hardest part to this trick, as with nearly every other trick, is to have the confidence to try it in the first place. Just remember, after your first time trying it, you can always try it again a lot easier.

The spin I am going to be looking at is the 360. For the set up for this trick, the best place to try it is on a fun box, with a transitioned ramp going on to flat. Make sure that there are no rails or anything in the way, so it is just the ramp and the flat on top. This way you don’t need to go too fast to get the air time, and it is not a fast landing, because it is flat at the same level of the lip.

So, to the 360; you will want to approach the ramp at just about jogging speed, head for the middle of the ramp, so long as it is wide. You will need to know which direction you are going to be spinning in. If you ride right foot forwards, then you will generally spin to your left, and if you ride left foot forwards, then you will spin to the right. The initiation of the spin is the hardest part. You need to carve in the direction you will spin on the ramp, not too much, about 45 degrees. When you take off the lip, look over your left shoulder and spin your shoulders. As long as your head and shoul-ders are spinning, the rest of your body will follow.When you have taken off the lip, you should be around 90 degrees spun, keep looking over your shoulder