Mountain Biking

Sometimes park riding actually rewards you without you having to learn anything.

For example, if you take a run down a well built jump line, you just have to hold onto your natural speed and you'll hit the landing. Often steep lippy jumps you can't even see the target. So basically there is no rider judgement going into it, you're just fooling around with jump mechanics.

One younger racer I was mentoring could not hit the crux jump on an intermediate park lap, and I realized that he lacked a beginner skill of being able to adjust his speed for the size of jump.

This same thing happens if you take freeride jumping onto tech trails... An intermediate park rider can struggle with more raw terrain on the same level of difficulty just because they haven't honed that aspect.

Another gotcha is that jumping and riding mechanics actually vary greatly depending on the speed and context. There is no "one correct way" to go off a drop, it is all determined by your entry speed, slope angle, landing zone etc. You have to have a whole crayon box of skills to fully cover it all. Some park riding really simplifies all the other details.

It works the opposite also. A lot of tech riding you never really learn to hit anything at the higher speed that's used on park runs, and it's a pretty big learning curve just due to the higher amplitude and bigger consequences.