Mountain Bike Basic Types
Whether dedicated to professionals or amateurs, the mountain bikes range became extremely diverse lately. Choose your mountain bike by suspension, wheel, tires design or discipline oriented designs.
The modern mountain bikes have evolved quite a lot compared to the first models of bicycles back in the early days of the cycling itself. The design of the nowadays mountain bikes is rooted in the style frame and geometry of the road bicycles. However, mountain bikes have been designed and built to correspond to the new riding styles, which now tend to be more aggressive, but also for more comfort and flexibility.
The structure of the archetypal mountain bike includes the standard elements: a frame, a fork, two pedals, two wheels with tires, breaks and suspension system. Same as any simple road bicycles. Nevertheless, the geometry of a mountain bike has its own particular features which make the difference in the field.
When describing a mountain bike, we should mainly consider the purpose of such a device. Unlike the road bicycles, mountain bikes are designed for off-road, rough terrain. Mountain biking may be performed on every country back roads, fire roads or other trails that cross through forests, mountains, deserts of even fields. The coarse riding conditions require a higher durability and a better performance from both the rider and its bike. Therefore, mountain bikes come now specially equipped with wider and knobby tires, large frame tubing and a more reliable front fork, not to mention the dual suspension, all created for a better shock absorbance and reliability.
Mountain bikes may be classified according to different criteria. Based on suspension, mountain bikes range from fully rigid, through hard tail/soft tail to full suspension (also called dual suspension). Naturally, it is advisable to choose a full suspension mountain bike, due to the dual suspension system, front and rear. This way, the rear wheel moves on pivots and shocks are better absorbed. Hard tail and soft tail models have front suspension, but no or little rear suspension.
Another major classification criterion is by discipline oriented design. Generally, one can distinguish four major categories, namely: cross country, downhill, free ride and trials/street riding. These four types of mountain bikes correspond to four sports styles of mountain biking, bearing the same names. The construction and the features of each type of mountain bike are defined mainly by the terrain where the bikes are employed.
The materials used for the bikes construction make a huge difference between styles. Therefore, mountain bikes divide into light or heavy, strong or less durable, faster or mild-to-moderate speed, single-purpose or multi-purpose mountain bikes. Cross country mountain bikes are generally accepted as the most popular type, becoming famous for the lightweight and still robust materials used in the construction process and serving for multi-purpose activities. Downhill bikes are an example of single purpose equipment. They are dedicated only to downhill trails and races; they are really fast and the breaks system is really efficient.
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