Drops: A Progression from Rollable to Committed

Four stages, not one technique

Coaches treat drops as a genuine progression of difficulty rather than a single skill you either have or don't:

1. Rollable drops — both wheels can stay on the ground the whole way; approach in a relaxed, ready position and roll over the top under control. No jumping or boosting required.
2. The front-tire "poke" — for small, non-rollable drops (roughly under two feet), push the handlebar forward — not up, not a pull — as the front wheel crosses the lip, so the front tire moves forward relative to you and shifts your weight back toward the rear wheel.
3. Intermediate drops (roughly two feet and up, non-rollable) — add a front wheel lift before the lip. Lifting the front pushes the bike further out from the edge, giving the rear tire time to catch up before the front drops, and helps the bike land level instead of nose-first.
4. Bigger, advanced drops — the same motions become more exaggerated and deliberate: leading the front wheel down with the arms as it clears the lip, pressing down through your feet and hands to compress the bike before leaving the edge (especially useful at lower speed), and absorbing the landing with bent elbows and knees as the rear wheel touches first.

Worth knowing before you start: a very steep, rollable roll-in — the kind trail-builders call a "chute" — is a different skill from a drop, even though both look intimidating from the top. If both wheels can stay on the ground the whole way down, however steep, you're in rolling-steep-terrain territory (hips bent forward, weight through the pedals, brake bias shifted toward the rear as it gets steeper), not this drop progression. This guide is specifically about features where the wheels genuinely leave the ground.

Why a matching landing slope changes everything

Once your wheels clear the lip of a drop, gravity is the only thing acting on you — your path through the air is already decided by your speed and angle at takeoff, which is exactly why scouting and committing to a known speed beforehand (rather than adjusting mid-air) matters so much. How hard a landing actually hits you depends specifically on the part of your speed pointed straight into whatever you land on. A landing that continues sloping downward in roughly the direction you're already traveling absorbs the impact gradually, spread across the slope; landing that same drop onto flat, level ground — even from a modest height — drives a much larger share of that force into you and the bike all at once. This is the physical reason coaches are so consistent about scouting for a sloped, forgiving landing and treating a flat landing as a much bigger deal than the raw height alone would suggest.

Braking: 2-1-0

A simple rule covers braking around any drop: both brakes on the approach, rear brake only (if needed at all) as you cross the obstacle, and zero brakes on the way out. Grabbing the front brake going over the lip, or immediately on landing, is one of the most common ways riders pitch themselves over the bars on a drop — finish your braking before you commit to the feature, not on it or right after.

Scout the landing every time

Walk any drop you haven't ridden before and confirm the landing is clean and the runout is known before you commit to it from the saddle — this is a repeated, non-negotiable safety habit across coaching sources, especially once a landing is blind from the takeoff. Use that walk to actually judge the landing's slope and direction relative to where you'll be traveling, not just to check for hazards — that's the difference between a landing that will absorb your speed and one that won't, per the physics above. A maintained "ladder drop," which lets you choose your height incrementally, is a commonly recommended tool for building up height gradually rather than jumping straight from curb-height to something consequential.

A note on how this guide will grow

Like the jumping guide, this one stays intentionally conservative in what it asks you to attempt. Drops carry real consequence once you're past the rollable stage, so even as the coaching and physics behind it deepens, this page's job is to give you an honest, sourced orientation, not a substitute for in-person feedback — a coach or a maintained progression feature can watch your form in ways no page can.

Practical takeaways

• Start on truly rollable drops before attempting anything your wheels have to leave the ground for — and know the difference between a rollable steep chute and an actual drop.
• Learn the front-tire poke on small drops before adding a front wheel lift for bigger ones.
• Scout the landing's slope, not just its cleanliness — a landing that continues your flight path is dramatically softer than the same drop onto flat ground.
• Follow 2-1-0 braking: both brakes before, rear-only (if any) across, none on landing.
• Never ride a drop with an unscouted or blind landing — walk it first, every time.