You've Watched the Videos.
Now What?

You've watched the videos. Someone crossing a river in Patagonia, someone threading through Albanian mountain tracks, someone camping on a ridge with the bike parked behind the tent. You want that. The question is how to get from where you are — zero offroad experience, maybe not even a motorcycle licence yet — to actually doing it.

The good news: the path is well-worn and shorter than you think. The bad news: there are no shortcuts. Offroad riding is a physical skill. It takes time, repetition, and falling over a lot before it clicks. But it does click, and every step on the way is rideable.

This article covers the progression. Not gear, not bike choice, not budget. Those are separate decisions. This is purely about how you go from watching to riding.

Step 1: Book a guided tour with a rental

Before you buy anything, find out if you actually enjoy offroad riding — or if you just enjoy watching it. Those are two very different things. The cheapest way to answer that question is a guided offroad tour where you show up and they provide everything: bike, helmet, boots, route, guide.

These tours exist in most countries with rideable terrain. They range from half-day introductions to week-long expeditions. For your first time, a one- or two-day tour is enough. You'll learn whether the physical effort, the heat, the constant focus, and the inevitability of dropping the bike are things you find exciting or exhausting.

What to look for: small groups — under eight riders. A backup vehicle that carries water and can haul a broken bike. Terrain-appropriate bikes, meaning something under 200 kg, not a fully loaded touring machine. An instructor who rides behind the slowest rider, not ahead of the fastest one.

Expect to drop the bike. Multiple times. This is not a failure — it's how offroad riding works at every level. The ground is soft, the speed is low, and nothing breaks. If the tour operator treats drops as a problem, find a different operator.

At the end of the day you'll know. Either you're already planning the next one, or you're relieved it's over. Both answers save you money.

Step 2: Take an offroad riding course

A guided tour shows you the experience. A course teaches you the skill. These are not the same thing, and the course is the more important investment.

Offroad riding courses focus on the fundamentals that are either invisible or impossible to learn from videos: standing on the pegs with your weight centred and low, feathering the clutch through loose terrain, keeping the throttle steady when the front wheel washes, braking on gravel without locking the rear, and reading the surface two bike lengths ahead of you.

Most courses provide bikes — usually light, purpose-built training bikes that are easy to pick up and cheap to repair. This matters. You want to push your limits in a controlled setting without worrying about scratching your own machine.

A good course also teaches you to pick up a dropped bike. This sounds trivial until you're standing over a 180 kg motorcycle lying on its side in sand, already tired, and nobody is around to help. The technique is simple — back to the bike, squat, lift with your legs — but it needs to be drilled until it's automatic. A course makes you do it fifteen times on purpose so that the sixteenth time, when it happens for real on a mountain track, it's routine.

One weekend of structured instruction is worth more than a full season of self-taught riding. The bad habits you avoid in the first ten hours will save you crashes in the next thousand.

Step 3: Join group rides

This is where you need your own bike and gear. The course and guided tour provided everything — from here on, you're riding your own machine. We'll cover bike choice and equipment in a separate article.

With that sorted, other people become your biggest asset.

Find local offroad or adventure riding communities — online forums, social media groups, or riding clubs in your area. Most regions have at least one active group that organises regular rides. These are not tours with a paid guide. They're informal groups of mixed-ability riders who know the local tracks, share routes, and look out for each other.

Riding with a group teaches you things a course cannot: how to read another rider's line to find the best path through a section, how to pace yourself over a full day instead of a two-hour drill, how to communicate stops and hazards, and how to help recover a stuck bike in a ditch. You also learn what different levels of terrain actually look like — one rider's "easy trail" is another rider's limit.

Group rides are also where you build the network that makes adventure riding sustainable. Someone in the group has done the trip you're planning. Someone knows the mechanic who works on your type of bike. Someone has the tyre irons you need to borrow. Offroad riding is a solo activity on the trail but a community activity around it.

Start by joining rides labelled beginner-friendly or mixed-level. Ride at the back without apology. Nobody who rides offroad seriously judges a beginner for being slow — they judge them for riding beyond their ability and creating a rescue situation. Controlled and steady is respected. Fast and reckless is not.

Step 4: Train deliberately

Group rides build experience. Deliberate practice builds skill. They're not the same thing, and at some point you need both.

Find an open area — a field, a car park, a patch of hard-packed dirt — and drill specific manoeuvres. Slow-speed figure eights, standing turns, hill starts, emergency stops on gravel. These are boring. They are also the foundation of every impressive piece of riding you've ever seen on video. The rider threading a single-track mountain trail at speed is running on thousands of repetitions of exactly these drills.

The pickup drill deserves its own mention. Go to your practice area, put the bike on the ground on purpose, and pick it up. Then do it from the other side. Then do it when you're already tired. Do it until it's muscle memory, not an emergency. On any real offroad ride, you will drop the bike — often in an awkward spot, often when you're fatigued, sometimes alone. The riders who handle it calmly are the ones who practised it on purpose.

Sand deserves dedicated practice too. Sand is the terrain that humbles experienced riders the most, because the correct technique — stand up, weight back, steady throttle, loose grip, look far ahead — is the opposite of every instinct. Your body wants to sit down, tense up, and stare at the front wheel. The only way to override those instincts is repetition in a low-stakes setting.

Schedule practice sessions the way you'd schedule gym time. An hour a week of focused drills will improve your riding faster than a monthly full-day ride where you're just surviving the terrain.

Step 5: Ride on your own

At some point you stop following other people's routes and start planning your own. This is where offroad riding becomes adventure riding — you choose where to go, you assess the terrain, you decide whether to push through or turn back.

Start with short loops close to home. Two to three hours, terrain you've ridden before or that you can assess from a map. The goal isn't distance — it's decision-making. You're learning to read a trail on a map before you ride it, to judge whether a track is within your ability from the first hundred metres, and to plan a route that has bail-out options if things go wrong.

Route planning is a real skill. A line on a map doesn't tell you if the track is hard-packed gravel or axle-deep mud. Satellite imagery helps. Elevation profiles help more — a gentle-looking trail that gains 800 metres in 10 km is a very different ride from a flat forest track. Knowing the surface type, the gradient, and the distance between road crossings lets you make informed decisions before you commit.

This is also where you learn basic self-sufficiency. Carry a tyre repair kit and know how to use it. Carry enough water. Tell someone where you're going and when you expect to be back. Check your chain tension and tyre pressure before every ride. None of this is complicated, but all of it matters when you're 40 km from the nearest road on a track with no phone signal.

The progression: practice to double tracks to single trails

The terrain you ride follows a natural progression, and it's worth being honest about where you are on it.

Practice areas — fields, car parks, flat dirt. This is where you drill technique with no consequences. No drops to worry about, no oncoming traffic, no exposure. Stay here longer than your ego wants you to.

Double tracks — wide unpaved roads, forest roads, gravel tracks with room for two vehicles. These are real offroad terrain but forgiving: you can see what's coming, you have space to correct mistakes, and the surface is usually consistent. Most adventure riding happens on double tracks, and there's nothing wrong with staying at this level permanently. Some of the best rides in the world are on wide mountain tracks with incredible views and not a single technical section.

Single trails — narrow paths, one bike width, often with rocks, roots, ruts, and no room for error. This is where all those drills pay off. Single trail riding demands precise throttle control, constant body-position adjustments, and the ability to read the surface in real time. It's immensely rewarding, but it's the last step, not the first. Riders who jump to single trails before they're solid on double tracks spend more time picking up the bike than riding it.

Move through this progression at whatever speed feels right. There's no timeline and no test. The terrain will tell you if you're ready — and if it doesn't, the ground will.

It just takes time

There is no hack, no shortcut course, no magic bike that makes offroad riding easy. It's a physical skill that develops through repetition, the same way any sport does. Your first ten hours on dirt will feel chaotic. By fifty hours, you'll have a base. By two hundred, you'll ride terrain that once terrified you without thinking about it.

The progression described here — tour, course, group rides, practice, solo rides — is not the only way. Some riders skip straight to buying a bike and teaching themselves. Some never ride alone. Some never leave double tracks, and that's completely fine. The point is that a path exists, it's well-proven, and you can start this weekend with nothing more than a booking confirmation.

Stop watching. Go ride.