Category: Learning

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73. Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

The “Ladder of Learning” framework is a classic from teaching, but aligns well with rider development. But modern riders have new tools such as on-bike cameras and performance-tracking apps to allow objective looks at how they cope with the roads and develop skill at braking and leaning. Focused sessions targeting one skill at a time—the Salami Principle—remain highly effective as does deliberately broadening experience. A fresh challenge can reignite development, but remember that skill is never ‘complete’; each plateau is just the level ground before the next climb.

Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

Riders can get stuck in their development. Some years back I took on a trainee who felt that his riding development had reached a plateau. He had several years of riding behind him after passing the bike test, and had starting on a course of advanced training. But after some initial improvement, the feedback being given to him after his observed rides wasn’t showing any further development. He knew there was more to learn – after all, that was what his observer was telling him – but his forward progress had stalled and he didn’t know why, nor how to resume forward development. His observer had been telling him he needed to develop some ‘gloss’ on his riding, but he felt he’d peaked. His enquiry email asked: “Is this kind of normal – learning a bit, levelling off for a while, learning a bit more, levelling off even more etc or am I right in thinking I’ll just never be better than I am now?” So here’s another question. Can we identify the barriers that stop our development in its tracks?

The first thing I’ll say is that ‘advanced’ training does not replace what we learned when we started out as a motorcyclist. The fact is that basic training teaches us 90% of the skills we’ll use 90% of the time. So post-test training supplements, but does not supplant, what would better be termed ‘core skills’. And if that’s the case, there should be a couple of obvious reasons for a levelling-off effect:

  • each new level of learning produces less-dramatic results because we’re increasingly ‘improving’ rather than ‘adding’ skills and knowledge- the improvements are ever more subtle

  • each new level of learning is usually harder work – we’ll only see results if we’re prepared to put in the effort and that may push us outside our comfort zone

Putting in the effort emphasises the need for practice. ‘PRACTICE makes PERMANENT’ (and not perfect). In other words, if we want ANY learning to stick, we need to keep going out and using what we learned. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new language or riding a motorcycle round bends. It’s often LACK of practice that stalls development. It’s a point I make several times during one of my advanced motorcycle training courses, but I cannot make riders go out and practice.

Practice must also has to be targeted. Simply going out riding isn’t the answer, because it’s “the same day’s experience, experienced one thousand times”. We have to spend time working on what we learned.

So when progress has stalled, it may well be a failure to spend time working with the new skills.

Here’s something else to consider. Learning occurs in a series of sequential steps starting from the point where initially, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: This is ’16er with a CBT on a scoot’ syndrome – not enough experience and not enough knowledge to know what we need to know.

CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: after a while, we begin to recognise we have issues and that we don’t know how to deal with it. This is roughly the level the DVSA hazard perception test aims at – the ability to click a button when a car might cause a SMIDSY collision, but no understanding of how or why it happens is needed, nor any strategy to deal with the problem.

CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: maybe more experience or after training for a DVSA test pass, we’ve learning, but it’s still a ‘work-in-progress’ – we have to constantly remind ourselves to what to do. It’s good developmental stage, but it’s essentially still a ‘reactive’ one where we respond AFTER a hazard develops and prone to lapses where we forget.

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: ride long enough or take the short-cut of some post-test training and with a bit of luck our ability to read the road, analyse what we see, and respond to hazards has all become ‘proactive’ – we no longer have to think our way through problems, it’s become a smooth, well-practiced drill.

These four sequential steps are sometimes known as the ‘Ladder of Learning’.

The first two stages impose serious limitations on safety which is why basic training aims to push us straight into the third ‘conscious competence’ phase, and post-test training aims to take us beyond. The trouble is that learning is hard work. As we try out the new ideas or techniques, we’re consciously processing what we’re doing and using our real-time thinking brain in this way is exhausting. We simply can’t keep it up for long – it’s a real problem with day-long CBT training – and that can lead to two mistakes:

  1. trying too hard – just as with my own advanced coaching sessions, we’ll achieve far more from short practice sessions than by going out for long rides

  2. trying to do everything at once – tackle one thing at a time, it’s the way I teach riders and it’s the way I advise them to practice. I call it the Salami Principle. Why? Slices of salami eaten over time are delicious and digestible. But if we try to eat the whole thing at once, we’ll be sick. The same applies to skills – sliced up, we can practice and achieve the result we were looking for, attempt everything at once and we’ll be overwhelmed with the task.

And simply mastering any technique isn’t enough either. Longer term, we have to work to embed what we learned into our regular riding. Just ‘knowing’ what we should be doing isn’t enough. The moment I hear – as someone wrote on a forum recently – “I have to concentrate too hard when I’m riding advanced”, it means they haven’t worked at making the techniques so automatic that they have become an unconscious part of everyday riding technique. If we don’t USE it, we LOSE it.

What’s far less obvious is that once we get to the top of one particular ladder, we’ll be at the bottom of the next – there’s always something we don’t know. But of course we don’t know that. Another way our development can stall is if we only ever do the same riding with the same group of people or ride the same kinds of roads. With no new benchmarks, we’ll never discover if we need new skills – we’ll assume we’re good enough. If we want to continue to develop, we need to understand that the learning process doesn’t end.

So if we’re feeling comfortable with our riding, it could be time to push ourselves out of our comfort zone again, to head back to the level of conscious incompetence where we’re ready to learn new ideas and skills. And just possibly, a change of perspective is needed. Perhaps a Survival Skills advanced rider training course may be just the change you need to kick-start development again.

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09. The Salami Principle and Practice Makes Permanent – the key to learning new skills

Reviewing this article in the context of what I know now about skill acquisition indicates that I could have added some useful nuance to these ideas. We now know that practice is most effective when it is accompanied by clear, specific feedback, so that errors are identified early rather than being unknowingly embedded. It is also more robust when practice is varied and contextual, with changes in speed, environment or constraints, because this improves transfer to real-world riding rather than competence in a single exercise. Mental rehearsal and visualisation have been shown to reinforce physical practice, particularly where time, space or confidence are limited. Just as importantly, riders benefit from deliberate self-reflection — asking what has improved, what still feels weak, and why — rather than assuming progress is automatic. Finally, long-term improvement depends less on knowing what to practise than on sustaining the motivation to practise, which is best supported by small, achievable goals and visible progress rather than endless repetition of the same exercise.

But essentially, the underlying problem it addresses has not changed; skills do not “stick” simply because we attended a course. Subsequent research into motor learning, habit formation, and behaviour change has largely reinforced these ideas rather than replaced them. Terms such as chunking, spaced repetition, and deliberate practice are now commonplace, but the principles remain the same.

The Salami Principle and Practice Makes Permanent – the key to learning new skills

Each of my courses ends with a debrief where I remind the trainee of the aim of the course (ie, what they wanted to get out of it and what I thought they needed), how we approached those goals, what was achieved, what remained weak, and the need to continue working AFTER the course. The last point is one of the most important, but also one of the most overlooked. Any course of training has a limited effect… unless the trainee commits to continually reviewing and practicing what was covered.

Training courses require three steps:

the first stage is ‘preparation’ which is all about the behind-the-scenes work that the trainer does to prepare for the course
the second stage is’engagement’, which very briefly indicates that the training has to be interesting AND relevant to the trainee.
and third is ’embedding’, which is whether or not the training is delivered in a way that ‘sticks’.

“Preparation is all” is something you’ll hear regularly. Actually, it’s important but it’s not everything, and even a technically well-prepared course can fall down because the content is wrong for the student (or the trainer fails to show the trainee why it IS relevant). Or it can fail because the worthwhile content is boring.

But even if a course is well-prepared, well-delivered and relevant, there’s no guarantee it’ll stick. It needs to become ’embedded’.

The first version of this article, written quite some time ago recognised the need to get the trainee to do some work to help with this embedding. I talked about the need for practice, and I used a phrase I first heard from one of my earliest trainees, who happened herself to be a horse riding instructor. She said:

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. What it actually does is makes PERMANENT. So if you practice the wrong techniques, you won’t get better, you will only make the wrong techniques a permanent part of your performance. And that’s why you need to practice the perfect.”

That actually made an awful lot of sense. But practice alone isn’t enough. Training needs to be structured in a way that breaks a particular skill down into manageable chunks, which build back together in a logical order. This is something I’ve been doing since the earliest days and one day at the end of the session, I was explaining how the trainee could use this approach to schedule meaningful practice. I called it ‘compartmentalisation’ and he said: “Ah, the Salami Principle” and explained that thin-sliced, a salami is delicious and digestible. But try to eat the entire salami in one go, and we’ll simply make ourselves sick.

The Salami Principle applies to riding. Don’t try to practice everything at once, but remember the structure of the training and how it was broken down into simpler techniques which can be practiced one at a time. Even if we think we can remember everything, when still in the ‘practice makes permanent’ stage of development, it’s all too common for it all to fall apart again. Bang goes the trainee’s new-found confidence.

Slow riding skills are a good example. What do riders do when they want to practice slow control? They go out and attempt U-turns. They often do it on a new bike that they’ve never attempted a U-turn on before. What happens? They fall off. Why? Because a U-turn is the END product (albeit a pretty useless one in itself) of a sequence of skills, NOT the starting point. It’s only a moment’s thought to realise that controlling a bike around any tight turn needs sub-skills:

posture - gripping the tank with the knees and keeping the shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck loose
the ability to slip the clutch
the ability to balance clutch and throttle together
the ability to ride the bike at a consistent speed by controlling speed with the rear brake
the ability to look into the turn
knowing where to look into the turn and what NOT to look at
knowing how and why we should use counter-weighting
understanding where and when to make steering inputs
being comfortable with the bike leaning

All those can be practiced in that order, working on one skill at a time until we are happy we’ve got the hang of it. Some can be done at a standstill – posture and turning our head for example, or looking for ‘reference points’ to help make a tight turn and not get distracted by the kerb. Only when each is mastered do we move onto the next one. And then the skill set is pulled together using easy exercises like the Figure of 8 where there is plenty of room to start fast and wide before pulling the circles in tighter.

But set off straight into a U-turn without having practiced and mastered these skills and things can – and do -go wrong very quickly indeed.

But it was rather more recently that I discovered why practicing makes permanent. It’s known as the ‘Ebbinhaus Forgetting Curve’ and it dates from as far back as 1885, when Hermann Ebbinghaus first realised that we rapidly forget most of what we just learned, retaining relatively little from any learning experience.

What he showed over a century ago remains true to day. Any training course can fail to bring about lasting behaviour change, even when the first two stages of training – preparation and engagement – are well-designed, and even when the student has a strong intention to change.

Likewise with rider training. It’s incredibly easy to slip back into old habits within a very short time. What can be done to try to maximise the chance that the skills learned in the session are actually embedded? There are two possible solutions.

The first – also discovered by Ebbinghaus – is known as ‘over-learning’. The idea is that a particular skill is repeated over and over, beyond what would normally be seen as necessary to master it. To some extent, that is built into my courses – I tend to repeat the same ‘trigger phrases’ many times and I try to ensure that the trainee gets plenty of opportunity to work on particular skills during the session. But there’s a risk that if the trainee thinks he or she is simply repeating what’s already mastered, rather than embedding the necessary skills, the training can become boring and demotivating. U-turn practice, anyone?

The second is to repeat the training. Ebbinghaus discovered that after five re-runs, retention becomes near-perfect. This is the approach often taken by safety-critical industries like a nuclear plant.

Unfortunately, it should also be fairly obvious that when delivering my kind of one-off training course I have a bit of a problem. Unless I can persuade trainees to come back for a refresher, I generally only get to see them once. So now the onus is on the trainee to ensure that having completed the course, they actively continue to practice what was learned.

How can I encourage that? One way is to provide structured notes both before and after the course. The first lays out the content we will be covering, the second – which also offers a structured path for continued development – repeats the information in terms of “what we worked on”.

And I have a trick up my sleeve. Rather than send on the review immediately after the course, I send it ten days or so after the course. Why? If they read it next day, when their retention rate from the course is up near 100%, they skim through it, say “oh yes, I remember that”, and then promptly forget it. With the delayed review, the forgetting curve has kicked in so I’m REMINDING them of what was achieved. There is a better chance the trainee will read the notes properly and thus gain more from the feedback.

But of course, ultimately it all depends on the trainee – once they’re headed head home, if I’ve failed to drive home the ‘practice makes permanent’ point and if they think “that’s it, I’m trained now”, then there is a significant risk that in fact they’ll slither rapidly down that forgetting curve.

So, here are the takeaways.

If we accept that we can improve our riding through learning new techniques, then it’s essential that we practice to embed what we learned into long-lasting improvements to skill and confidence. And if we accept the need for practice, then break it all down into the into the simpler, relatively straightforward elements that were learned, and practice each part of the skill-set. Then move onto the next area of skills.

So if you’re reading this post-training, wherever it might be, and whoever might have trained you, ask yourself, “am I reviewing and practicing what I have learned frequently enough?” Schedule some time to go out on a regular basis, to think about your riding, give yourself a goal of a specific part of your riding to improve – and then practice, practice, practice.

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08. How far is too far?

When this piece was first written, the language of “cognitive load”, “human factors” and “decision fatigue” was not yet commonplace in rider training. Since then, research and experience have only strengthened the case made here: that learning on a motorcycle is limited not by ambition or mileage targets, but by the rider’s capacity to concentrate, absorb feedback and recover. High-mileage, endurance-style training made sense in an operational policing context; its uncritical transfer into civilian advanced training remains questionable. Traffic environments are now busier, bikes more capable, and distractions more numerous — making the question “how far is too far?” more relevant than ever. Mileage alone is a poor proxy for training value.

How far is too far?

There is undoubtedly a fine balance to draw between theory and practical time on the bike but good teaching demands both. Genuine riding exercises have a definite place but they require explanation. Simply piling on the miles is not good teaching technique, just as endless ‘chalk and talk’ offers limited opportunity to practice the theory.

Reading an industry mag some years back, the star letter writer – a training school owner – referred to a discussion with the owner of another school who, he claims, boasted of controlling his costs by: “padding out talks and never covering more than 50-60 miles during a full day’s training”. The letter writer, by contrast, claimed to offer “maximum on-road instruction” which reminded me of an ex-police instructor who claimed never to cover less than 200 miles in a day when out with his trainees.

So how far is too far?

There’s a simple answer to this. If the trainee is getting tired, then the session has gone too far.

Fatigue is dangerous. When we’re tired we make mistakes. Think back to your car lessons and remember how knackered you were after a two-hour session behind the wheel. Or remember how exhausting CBT and each day’s subsequent training was. As concentration slips, learning deteriorates and far worse, the risk of a riding error is magnified manyfold.

An experienced WORKING rider (such as a police rider, an instructor or a courier) may well be able to ride all day, but I worry when I hear of trainees doing eight-hour days and 200 mile rides. If the rider averages a reasonable 40 mph, that’s 5 hours riding time. 200 miles would have been a fair distance to ride in a day when I was despatching. These kind of distances will push typical commuting or recreational riders to (and possibly beyond) the limit.

And we still have to fit in the theory training, any off-road exercises and some breaks. Given the need for rest stops, I really wondered what the 200-miles-a-day instructor was actually managing to deliver in his eight hour day. It’s a lot more informative to ride short stretches for ten or fifteen minutes with interim debriefs whilst everything is still fresh in the trainee’s head, than hack fifty miles up the road between cafes. Well-designed theory sessions, as well as short off-road practice sessions, give the trainees a physical rest and a mental change of gear.

It’s also often overlooked by training schools that whilst the instructor is likely to be close to home, the trainee may well have had an early start and a long ride to get to the school. Even starting from an inn just ten minutes from the circuit, I had to set off at 7am for a race school to arrive in time to complete the formalities. By 1pm – six hours later – I’d spent two hours on track and another two hours in briefings and debriefings, and I was shattered. That’s why my own Survival Skills advanced rider training courses are pegged at five hours; beyond that fatigue sets in and learning drops off. And trainees have to get home again! I had 170 miles to ride back after that session. I left at 2pm and missed the afternoon session completely.

The perfect balance will vary from rider to rider since different trainees respond to different approaches. Too much talk is a turn-off for some, who want to get on the bike and ride, but others actually want to talk – they may want to discuss particular issues at length or be willing and able to learn from in-depth question and answer sessions. It’s up to the instructor to vary the lesson to suit each client, and not to make a teacher-centric decision about how the course should proceed.

The least charitable view would be that trainers running high mileage courses are actually padding out the lack of theory by simply keeping the trainee sitting on the bike all day! After all, spending a few ££s on another five litres of unleaded is much easier than actually writing a decent syllabus and putting together a lesson plan for the day. But mostly I get the feeling it’s simply lack of imagination and a case of “that’s the way it’s always been done” and yet another hangover from police training.