STARTING OUT

First things first - make sure your quad is in good working order, and you have all your safety gear checked. Whoops are demanding on both you and your machine, and you don't want to cut corners when preparing to tackle these gnarly obstacles. Learning to keep your quad under control in an out-of-control situation is the overall goal. Whether you ride in the dunes, on the trails, or on a racetrack, at one time or another you will come across a section that can put you and your ATV out of control.

Most motocross tracks have a whoop section. For those of you who don't know what a whoop section is, it is a section of bumps-mini-jumps, actually - that are intended to slow down the speeds of the rider. A variation on the whoop theme is the braking bumps you see at the entrance to many turns. Either way, not knowing how to handle your ATV in this type of situation can put you on your head real fast. If you read our story on how to jump, you learned about the attack position. To quickly recap, the attack position is were you are not sitting all the way down, but not standing all the way up either. Instead, you're hovering over the rear of the seat with your arms bent, ready to help your quad take the blow of the first bump. Just as when you're jumping, you want to judge the distance of the whoop section itself, as well as the size of the bumps. Once again, start out small and work your way up. After riding over the whoops a couple of times, and you feel comfortable with your timing runs, then it’s time for you to hit them with some speed.

One of the major causes of endos is the front of your quad smashing into the face of the next bump. This compresses the suspension and turns your quad into a catapult. The best way to avoid this catastrophe is by keeping the front of your quad light. You can achieve this by keeping your weight towards the rear of the quad, and staying on the gas. It's also important to keep your quad going straight. A common mistake made while going through a section of whoops is that the rider is steering through the whoops. The loss of your momentum will cause the front end of the quad to dip, and that puts you back into the quad-as-catapult scenario.

GETTING ON THE GAS

Now that you feel comfortable with how you and your quad feel while working your way through a set of whoops, it’s time to move on to bigger and tougher things. No two sets of whoops are the same. Some are staggered, while others have a rhythm to them, and some are just plain out of control. While racing, the faster you go, the easier it is to get through. Think about it—if you go slow, your tires will roll into the gap between the whoops. But if you are on the gas, your tires will just skim on the top, like a rock skipping across the water. The transition from being a rider who rolls over whoops to one who skips over them is a difficult one. Practice is the key, and you must start on very short sections with small whoops. Don't go out and try to nail a pro-level whoop section at full throttle, or you will very quickly find out why that is a bad idea.

Use your best judgment when approaching whoops at high speed. Test runs will help you determine just how fast you can go. Some whoop sections will have a rhythm to them; in that case you can double them two at a time. Once again, judging your speed is extremely critical; if you overshoot or undershoot the first set of jumps, you have a good chance of going over the bars. Timing is everything when riding through a set of whoops.

Just remember to use your best judgment, keep your quad going straight, and follow these few simple techniques to help take the fear out of whoops. Once you master them, you will have a huge advantage, on the track or the trail, over riders who haven't taken the time to learn to tackle this most-difficult of obstacles.