You can’t possibly watch a good fighter plane film like Top Gun or Iron Eagle without hearing a whole bunch of technical terms to describing the physics of aerial combat. If you pay attention, you might actually learn something—like why Goose’s death wasn’t actually Maverick’s fault. Well, believe it or not, many of these same scientific principles […] More »

Perhaps the factor we are most familiar with each time we ride, yaw refers to the forces of directional change. In perfectly ideal conditions, your ATV’s rear wheels should track perfectly behind the front wheels with even distribution of weight. The reality is that yaw rate does what it can to upset our quads’ chassis […] More »

We deal with pitch every single time the ground turns skyward or descends. We counter this shift in gravity by body positioning: Leaning forward over the bars on steep climbs and hanging off the rear of the ATV when descending. Pitch is also the factor responsible for moves like the wheelie or stoppie. Pitch plays […] More »

Roll is movement about a horizontal axis (think of the plane’s wings rising or dipping), pitch is also about a horizontal axis (nose pointing upward or down) and finally yaw is rotation about a vertical axis (turning left or right). In terms of riding, all three of these factors come into play—especially when our wheels lose […] More »