WHY ARE WE HERE: TO GET MORE PEOPLE ON BIKES!
Better Instructors and Guides provide safer, more effective, consistent, and fun lessons. This in turn makes the sport easier and safer for new riders to learn and current riders to keep progressing. Ultimately, this helps create a sport that is more appealing and easily accessible to non-riders, helping create new participants, while also ensuring the sport doesn’t lose current riders due to injury or lack of progression.
IMPROVE THE STANDARDS OF TEACHING & GUIDING
The quality of mountain bike lessons and tours within the industry relies heavily on the training and knowledge of the Instructors and Guides, who lead these services. The PMBIA’s role is to ensure professional quality training courses, complete with consistent assessment methods, to create the best Instructors and Guides possible. The PMBIA Team have over 70 years of collective experience teaching mountain biking, training Instructors (some in multiple sports) and always listen to any and all feedback to continually evolve and refine the Instructor certifications the PMBIA provides.
INTERNATIONAL CONSISTENCY IN TEACHING METHODS & TERMINOLOGY
Regardless of what people ride, where they ride or how they ride, teaching with the PMBIA’s Six Skill System and proven teaching methodologies, allows an Instructor to safely and effectively progress any student, in any environment. There's simply isn’t a need for a “bike park” Instructor course, an “xc Instructor” course, a “Canadian” course, or an “Australian” course. A PMBIA Certified Instructor can teach and Guide any type of mountain biker, in a variety of terrain.
OPERATING AS A NON-PROFIT, MEMBER-LED ASSOCIATION
PMBIA is a registered nonprofit association led by its members. We’re governed by a volunteer Board of Directors elected by the membership, with a small staff team supporting daily operations. Because PMBIA is nonprofit, membership revenue is reinvested into the organization funding curriculum updates, instructor resources, program development, and the systems that support consistent course delivery worldwide. A member-elected board also provides governance, oversight, and checks and balances that help protect the organization’s mission, reduce conflicts of interest, and keep decisions focused on member benefit rather than profit.
MEMBER VALUE
As an active PMBIA member, you gain access to PMBIA courses and educational resources, plus member-only pro deals from industry partners helping you save on the gear and equipment you rely on every season. Renewing your membership keeps you connected to a global community of instructors while investing in your own professional growth. Your renewal directly supports new programs, updated resources, and ongoing improvements that elevate both your skills and the overall standard of mountain bike instruction worldwide.
HOW THE PMBIA WAS FORMED
The original PMBIA Courses began in 2006, and were created to provide the industry with an increased quality of training for mountain bike Instructors, by promoting a Skill-based teaching method; allowing Instructors to be trained and certified to teach in both cross country and downhill settings, through one course. Skill-based teaching had been proven in the ski and snowboard Instructor industries for over fifty years.
In establishing the PMBIA, the team was very careful not to “reinvent” the wheel. The PMBIA Certifications from ZEP and the MBIT Certifications from Endless Biking already shared many core concepts and methodologies. Having been proven, tested and developed for over ten years, the PMBIA courses were responsible for over 80% of the instructor training courses in North America, Australia and New Zealand, while the MBIT courses were widely accepted in North Van and other key mountain bike locations in BC and Alberta.
By using the PMBIA courses as the backbone and collaborating with the MBIT Courses, the PMBIA Team worked together to develop an even stronger, PMBIA Instructor Training system, that continues to be refined today through PMBIA’s Technical Committee.
Nearly ten years in the making, when the PMBIA was born in 2014, it represented a huge step forward for both the mountain bike industry as a whole, and especially the mountain bike teaching and guiding industry. The PMBIA is what industry asked for and today sits as the most widely available and internationally recognized mountain bike instructor certification system in the world.
Training thousands instructors every year in over 10 countries, the PMBIA’s mandate to offer a consistent, professional standard, worldwide, is still as important as ever as we continue to improve teaching and guiding standards in the industry. Ultimately this work provides the end user, the rider on the trails, a safer, more enjoyable riding experience through the world’s best coaches and guides.
The PMBIA is collaborative and actively working with other mountain bike operators. The PMBIA seeks to collaborate with anyone that is training mountain bike instructors in a professional manner. There have been many hours of consultation with other instructors & companies all over the globe, who offer training. We certainly hope that the PMBIA can grow to encompass all of our needs and goals as an industry. The PMBIA established a diverse Board of Directors and will continue to promote open forums to include any new ideas and discussions into the fold of the PMBIA, so that we can all grow together.