The Complete Guide to BMX Riding

Chapter 1: What Is BMX Riding and Why People Love It

So you're curious about BMX riding. Maybe you saw a video of someone carving through a concrete bowl. Maybe you walked past a skatepark and watched a kid boost off a jump and land clean like it was nothing. Maybe you just remember riding a bike as a kid and want to know if that feeling still exists, just with more style and bigger wheels.

Here's the short version: BMX riding is riding a small, sturdy bicycle to do more than just get from one place to another. The bikes look simple — a low frame, 20-inch wheels, thick tires, a single gear — but that simplicity is the whole point. Everything on a BMX bike is built to take a beating and to let you move the bike around in the air and on the ground in ways a normal street bike just can't handle.

There are several flavors of BMX, and you don't have to pick one immediately, but it helps to know what's out there. The most visible kind is park riding, which means riding at a skatepark — concrete bowls, quarter pipes, launch ramps, and rails. It's the kind of thing you see in highlight reels, with riders spinning bikes in the air and grinding metal ledges. Then there's street riding, which uses the city as your playground — stair sets, handrails, ledges, gap jumps between obstacles. Dirt jumping is exactly what it sounds like: