From what I have heard the faster you ride the harder your suspension should be.

Two questions:

What is the reasoning behind this? – wouldn’t you loose traction

How do you know when you should stiffen or soften your suspension?

If you’re riding faster you’ll be hitting things harder and flying higher, so you need firmer suspension.
If you never bottom out, lower the spring stiffness.
If you bottom out harshly too often, stiffen it up.
If you lose traction at a spring stiffness that avoids bottoming out too much, you need a more progressive spring rate and/or more travel. Almost all suspension setups on a bike give some degree of progressive rate (rear linkage for coil shocks and the air volume in coil spring forks both do this, except for weird shock linkages and late 90s pace forks with holes in to equalise pressure)

You need really hard suspension if you’ve just read a Pinkbike article about how Aaron Gwin runs really hard suspension.

Rather than admit you’re not the world’s fastest rider trying to blaze one 3 minute run for a 6 figure pay check, you’ll mince around the bikepark all day with excruciating finger pain.

Purely based on what I’ve observed from my own riding mates.

I like my susspension quite hard cos im a fat bastard.

If I get to the bottom without having used all of the available travel, I have to ask myself why I dragged it all the way to the top in the first place.

Neither, I have it fairly middly. Couldn’t care less if it makes me the fastest me I can be, it feels good, inspires confidence, does the job.

Except the rigid bike, it has soft tyres, hard forks, soft bars

All suspension should be run as soft as possible.
Yes, usually the faster you go, the firmer the setup.
But even Mr Gwinn will have his set as soft as he can.But his soft would be virtually rigid for me.
Check the o ring to ensure you use all available travel.

This only applies going downhill 😛

🙄

I’m with Doggycam.

Suspension generates more grip the softer it is. Obviously you have to balance that with your weight and the speed you’re hitting the trails. Bottoming out must be avoided either with stiffer springs or stiffer damping.

Striking the right balance is an art form 😆

I have never bottomed out my pikes so i’m planning to remove a volume spacer, I think they are at 25%

“I like my susspension quite hard cos im a fat bastard.”

I am afraid this ^, however the my rear setup is a lot softer on the pinion bike.

Check the o ring to ensure you use all available travel.

I though this sort of crap died out with “all bikes are better with raiser bars” circa 2004?

If you arrived at a track and it was smoother than average, meaning bottoming out was unlikely, would you soften your suspension? No you’d firm it up!

Conversely you would soften the high speed compression for a very rocky track.

The only direct controls over bottoming out are the progressiveness of the spring and low speed compression (yes high speed rebound, and high speed compression play a part too but those are secondary).

For me, it’s on the firm side of middling (although I have no suspension bikes at the moment!). Paraphrasing someone else up there, it’s either as soft as the track and your riding will allow, or as hard as you and your riding can cope with, if it’s optimum then those should be one and the same.

The only direct controls over bottoming out are the progressiveness of the spring and low speed compression (yes high speed rebound, and high speed compression play a part too but those are secondary).

Wrong way around. It’s high speed compression that controls bottoming, along with spring rate. HSR, LSC and LSR will all affect how far you move into the travel under smaller impacts and where you sit on average.

One thing I’ve learnt more recently is that it’s easy to run your fork harder than ideal because your handlebars aren’t high enough (or your bike isn’t slack enough). Soften the fork, raise the bars and get more grip and control and still don’t bottom out (my 160mm Pike has a Luftkappe in it so even at 30% sag it doesn’t dive through the midstroke).