Suspension school · Tuning by Riding Style

One Bike, Two Setups

Recording your numbers and switching tunes between disciplines

An eMTB ends up doing everything: Tuesday trail laps, a winter of slop, the odd bike park weekend, maybe a race. No single setup covers that spread well, but two written ones cover nearly all of it. The skill is not finding magic settings. It is knowing your numbers and moving between them deliberately.

Write Everything Down

• Fork: pressure, volume spacer count, rebound and compression clicks
• Shock: pressure (or coil spring rate and preload turns), spacer if fitted, rebound, compression and HBO position
• Tyres: pressures front and rear, casing, insert or not
• Date and conditions, so future you knows what this tune was for

Count damping clicks from fully closed, so the number you record is clicks out and fewer means firmer. The exception is RockShox's Charger 3 and 3.1 compression, which is labelled plus and minus around a centre 0, so there you record the dial reading itself. Whichever your hardware uses, pick one convention and never mix them. Half the mystery setups in the world are a rebound counted from the wrong end.

The Two-Tune Method

Most riders need a home tune and an event tune, and the gap between them is smaller than you might expect: typically 2 to 3psi in the fork, one volume spacer, two clicks of compression, one click of rebound and a tyre pressure change. That is ten minutes of work with a shock pump, which is the whole point. A switch that quick is a switch you will actually make.

• Bike park or uplift day: sag deeper, progression up, rebound slower, DH rubber on
• Enduro race: sag firmer, compression support up, insert in, spacer in
• UK winter: everything softer, faster and more open, pressures down
• Jump trails: sag firm, spacer in, rear rebound calmed
• Alps trip: as bike park, plus a brake check, sustained 1,000m descents cook pads and dampers alike

Volume spacers are the one change that does not suit weekly swapping, since they need the air let out and the top cap removed. Treat spacers as a seasonal or trip decision, and use compression clicks, and HBO if your shock has it, for the weekend-sized changes in support.

Use the Saved Tunes

The calculator on this page stores named setups, which beats a note on your phone because it keeps the numbers next to the chart that generated them. Save your current settings as Home before you change anything, build the second tune as a copy, and adjust from there. Two tunes with honest names will outperform one perfect setup you can no longer remember.

Re-baseline after every suspension service. Fresh oil and seals genuinely change how a damper feels, and the clicks that were right before the service will be close but not identical afterwards. Ten minutes of sag checking and single-click bracketing on the first post-service ride keeps the saved tunes truthful.

The riders whose bikes always seem dialled are not running secret settings. They know their pressures to the psi, their clicks from closed, and exactly what they changed last. Everything in this school works toward that: not one perfect setup, but a rider who can build the right one for tomorrow, in a car park, from a note, in ten minutes.