Tag: cognition

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55. Workload – the reason to Keep it Simple, Stupid

When this article was first written, the idea that rider and driver errors were often the result of cognitive overload rather than poor attitude or insufficient commitment was not widely accepted in motorcycling. Even now, there is still pushback in certain sectors framing errors as a simple deficiency in attitude or technique.

Since then, the same conclusions this article draws have been repeatedly confirmed in aviation, medicine and other safety-critical industries: human attention is finite, workload is cumulative, and once capacity is exceeded, performance degrades in predictable ways. This article reads, in hindsight, like a bridge between disciplines — translating human factors research into rider language well before that became fashionable. I could legitimately position it as an early application of systems safety thinking to motorcycling rather than simply an “advanced riding” piece.

Is it still relevant? Absolutely. Modern motorcycles may be more capable and modern riders more skilled, but the human brain — whether that’s the rider’s or the driver’s — has not changed. If anything, increased traffic density, in-helmet communications, information-rich dash panels and navigation systems, and ever-more complex riding environments make workload management more important than ever. The principles that follow were not speculative then — and they are even more relevant now.

Workload – the reason to Keep it Simple, Stupid

Over the years, one of my areas of fascination in researching the background for my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses has been the human brain and how it copes with riding. Our brains reached their current form with the appearance of Homo Sapiens around 200,000 years ago. But many components that make up our modern brain have their origins in the lower branches of the evolutionary tree. It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me how something that evolved when man had a top speed of something over 20 mph should be able to function rapidly enough to deal with riding at speeds well above that. I initially wrote this article with half an eye on the claims that using a hands-free mobile phone was safer than using a hand-held device, and with the other half on claims that skilled riders can safely use more complicated skills and techniques. It’s been rewritten somewhat, but the essential thinking about our ability to process limited amounts of information remains unchanged, as is the conclusion that we should use the simplest technique that is effective. Eventually, all this reading around the topic produced my book ‘MIND over MOTORCYCLE’ which you can find on my publisher page at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills. The book covers all this and more.

In the mid-80s a series of studies were carried out to evaluate a proposed one-man attack helicopter. The cockpit systems used a significant amount of automation. Neverthelss, it was determined that a single crew member could not adequately perform all the required tasks. As a result, the Comanche helicopter uses a two-person crew.

The term workload refers to the total demand placed on an individual as a task is performed. And even experienced and expert riders have a finite limit to the mental workload they can handle.

Now, if you want to, you can skip forward to how we cope on the road, but if you want more detail about the demands workload places on the brain, carry on reading.

The theory of competing resource channels

One explanation is that workload does not make demands on a single ‘central’ processing resource but instead uses several channels which compete for processing resources.

This theory was propopsed because we can easily walk and chew gum at the same time, but we cannot talk and listen at the same time – one explanation is that there must be multiple resources for information processing. These processing resources are usually described by four components; visual, auditory, cognitive and psychomotor, and any task can be broken down into the demands it places on each resource channel. The visual and auditory components refer to the external stimuli that are attended to, the cognitive component refers to the level of information processing required and the psychomotor component refers to the physical actions.

Rating scales have been developed for each component. The scales provide a relative rating of the degree to which each resource component is used. They were developed by providing surveys containing matched pairs of task descriptions to a range of human factors experts who were asked to indicate, for each pairing, which one required a higher level of effort. The higher the scale value the greater the degree of use of the resource component.

Scale – Value Description of Activity

  • Visual

0.0 – No Visual Activity

1.0 – Visually Register/Detect (detect occurrence of image)

3.7 – Visually Discriminate (detect visual differences)

4.0 – Visually Inspect/Check (discrete inspection/static condition)

5.0 – Visually Locate/Align (selective orientation)

5.4 – Visually Track/Follow (maintain orientation)

5.9 – Visually Read (symbol)

7.0 – Visually Scan/Search/Monitor (continuous/serial inspection, multiple conditions)

  • Auditory

0.0 – No Auditory Activity

1.0 – Detect/Register Sound (detect occurrence of sound)

2.0 – Orient to Sound (general orientation/attention)

4.2 – Orient to Sound (selective orientation/attention)

4.3 – Verify Auditory Feedback (detect occurrence of anticipated sound)

4.9 – Interpret Semantic Content (speech)

6.6 – Discriminate Sound Characteristics (detect auditory differences)

7.0 – Interpret Sound Patterns (pulse rates, etc.)

  • Cognitive

0.0 – No Cognitive Activity

1.0 – Automatic (simple association)

1.2 – Alternative Selection

3.7 – Sign/Signal Recognition

4.6 – Evaluation/Judgment (consider single aspect)

5.3 – Encoding/Decoding, Recall

6.8 – Evaluation/Judgment (consider several aspects)

7.0 – Estimation, Calculation, Conversion

  • Psychomotor

0.0 – No Psychomotor Activity

1.0 – Speech

2.2 – Discrete Actuation (button, toggle, trigger)

2.6 – Continuous Adjustive (flight control, sensor control)

4.6 – Manipulative

5.8 – Discrete Adjustive (rotary, vertical thumbwheel, lever position)

6.5 – Symbolic Production (writing)

7.0 – Serial Discrete Manipulation (keyboard entries)

Generally speaking, we have enough mental resources to carry out the most demanding tasks in any one of these categories or to carry out multiple but undemanding tasks that engage different channels.

But…

if we’re performing more than one task at the same time and those tasks make demands on similar components, the result is likely to be excess workload – we simply run out of brainpower to perform both tasks effectively. Any cumulative workload value of 8 or more was defined as an unacceptable workload level. Once we exceed the acceptable workload, the result is likely to be errors in our performance of those tasks. This includes a general slowing-down of the performance (it takes longer to process data and respond), task shedding (where we forget to do something completely), or rapid task switching (we hop back and forth ineffectually from one task to the other).

The component scale has been applied to model the tasks of driving whilst making a call on a mobile phone.

Task: Vis. Aud. Cog. Psy-M.

Driving: 6 1 3.7 2.6

Stopped at Light: 3 1 3.7 0

Start after stop: 6 1 4.6 2.6

Dial and Press Send: 5 4.3 5.3 7

Wait to connect: 0 4.3 3.7 2.6

Talk: 0 6 6.8 2.6

The model can therefore predict the individual component and total workload of the combined driving and cell phone tasks at any point during the execution of the combined tasks.

Workload Maximum Mean

Visual 11.00 6.26

Auditory 7.00 6.62

Cognitive 10.50 10.02

Psychomotor 9.60 5.43

From these figures it’s clear that the combined Cognitive tasks of driving whilst talking on the phone exceed the acceptable workload figures at all times. It’s not just when dialling to make a call when the task also makes demands of our visual and psychomotor resources which exceed the acceptable workload. And so drivers attempting to hold a conversation on a hands-free phone whilst behind the wheel are prone to make mistakes that a driver focused solely on driving would be highly unlikely to make.

What about on two wheels? The resources required to ride the bike would include all four components; the visual resource of looking at the road ahead, the cognitive resource as we interprete the visual data, the psychomotor resource which refers to the movement of arms, hands and feet to control the machine and even the auditory resource which would monitor from the sound of the engine.

So, how does this impact on real riding?

There is a limit to the amount of ‘mental processing power’ we have to ride a motorcycle. It would sound like riding would be difficult, if not impossible, in complex riding situations because we would exceed the workload limit. So we’d expect to see errors in performance of various tasks, a slowing-down of the performance of those tasks, task-shedding where we lose track of one part of the overall task, or rapid task switching where we ineffectually hop back and forth from one part of task to the another.

And in fact, that’s exactly what an instructor will see with a novice rider. A complex task such as a right turn (which involves making visual checks, a change of gear and the movement of the indicator switch, the cognitive element of judging speed and distance of the machine and other vehicles, plus the steering of the machine itself) might be performed perfectly off-road. But as soon as the novice rider attempts the same task on-road, it’s often poorly performed; visual checks go missing, the bike ends up in the wrong gear or the clutch control goes out the window, and indicators get forgotten.

So how do we ever overcome the problem?

The answer is that we ‘automate’ routine tasks – for example, the clutch / gear / throttle manipulation soon becomes so deeply embedded we no longer think about it, it just ‘happens’. And we can also learn to have a pre-planned response to specific ‘cue’ which also occurs below the level of consciousness. People have trouble believing this but our response to a red traffic light is a good example. Once out of the novice stage where we’re still actively scanning around for traffic signals, we don’t really ‘see’ the red light, we just drop into the routine of judging speed and distance, and slowing down effectively.

So, with experience, we become able to handle many straightforward tasks without having to process the incoming data in the real-time conscious ‘thinking’ brain. And that frees up attention for effective mirror checks, checking the surface ahead of us where we’re going to brake, and wondering whether the light might change back to green before we have to stop.

But the more complicated the task, the less attention we have to spare. Maybe we’re attempting to negotiate not just a single set of lights, but a complex road layout with multiple lanes in busy traffic, whilst trying to read road signs. Now, there’s a good chance we start to task-shed and skip steps – because our eyes are scanning the scene ahead, mirror checks often go missing.

And this brings me back to the helicopter. We don’t have the luxury of a second crew member. We have to get everything right alone, and that means the simpler we make riding, the less likely we are to hit the workload limit, and where something has to give.

I’ve written about overtaking, and gone through all the many points at which an overtake can go wrong – this article should give you a better idea why. The workload processing required to decide whether an overtake is ‘on’ or not takes even highly-experienced riders to the limit or even beyond their ability to mentally process all the data. So it’s incredibly easy to miss something, and it’s usually something obvious when we look at what went wrong retrospectively. Something as simple as the vehicle being overtaken indicating to turn right. Because of the demands on our processing resources, the flashing indicator never made it into the rider’s conscious awareness. And that’s why I suggest that we always keep things as simple as possible. If there are two ways to perform a task, the simplest method is nearly always the most reliable way.

And don’t forget the problem of talking on a mobile phone. But what do some instructors ask trainees to do – talk into a radio whilst riding in the form of a verbal commentary. Asking even an experienced rider to make a verbal commentary on a ride isn’t a good idea because it pushes the rider into ‘workload overload’ condition – check out the values from the first table:

Searching the road ahead: 7.0 – (Visually Scan/Search/Monitor (continuous/serial inspection, multiple conditions) )

Think what to say: 6.8 – (Evaluation/Judgment (consider several aspects) )

Say it: 1.0 – (Speech)

TOTAL WORKLOAD: 14:8

That’s way over our workload limit and we’ve not even talked about riding the bike! So that is why I don’t ask riders to perform a commentary ride.

“But the police do it all the time” I hear you say.

Indeed. Now, listen to HOW they talk. They have learned a very stilted, formalised language. They’ve essentially removed the need to THINK how to express what they see. And this brings workload down significantly. They also learn commentary riding and driving as part of a much longer course than a civvie rider will ever experience.

So this is why I do NOT require anyone to perform a commentary AS they ride. What I do is find places to stop, and let them perform their commentary at the side of the road. We’ve removed the workload connected with riding the machine and they can turn all their faculties towards identifying hazards. Even when I perform a commentary ride for the trainee, I’m aware that they have to listen, consider what I’ve just said, and visually search the scene to see what I’m talking about. So I only ever perform a commentary ride at a nice gentle pace that minimises the other workload demands on my trainee.

And finally, the workload overload issue is one of the reasons I use a building block approach to training, and why speeds are kept low when applying those new techniques. Covering new techniques one at a time is less-demanding and keeping speed down allows for correction when (not if!) mistakes are made.

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24. Trusting to Luck, Awareness of Hazards, and Risk Assessment and Risk Management

This was a very early post, written before I’d fully investigated concepts like the ladder of learning and later work on the concept of insight training, and risk homeostasis allows us to sharpen it and correct a few early assumptions. My central argument — that riders mistake statistical survival for skill-based safety — is entirely consistent with modern safety psychology. In fact, it aligns very closely with the phenomena known as:

:: Normalisation of deviance
:: Outcome bias
:: Risk compensation / risk homeostasis

The fact that familiarity dulls risk perception is now well established in behavioural science. Repeated exposure without consequence reduces perceived risk even when objective risk is unchanged. My observation that “they stop planning ahead and trust to luck again” is arguably the most important line in the article, and modern thinking has reinforced it rather than undermined it. The ‘six levels’ I mapped out fit well with models I discovered later:

Levels 1–3 → unconscious incompetence / conscious incompetence
Level 4 → rule-based competence
Levels 5–6 → insight-based, anticipatory control

Since this was first written, our understanding of why riders fail to manage risk effectively has moved on. It is now clearer that the problem is not simply a loss of skill, but a shift in thinking. Riders do not consciously decide to take more risk; instead, familiarity quietly reshapes their expectations. When nothing goes wrong, we unconsciously downgrade hazards from “threat” to “routine”, and begin to interpret safe outcomes as evidence of our own competence rather than statistical good fortune. This is closely related to what psychologists call risk compensation: improvements in skill or experience are often “spent” on riding faster, overtaking more often, or accepting smaller margins, leaving overall risk unchanged. The critical difference between riders who continue to progress and those who stagnate is not technical ability, but whether they maintain a habit of questioning their assumptions — actively challenging the belief that because something has always worked before, it will continue to do so next time.

Trusting to Luck, Awareness of Hazards, and Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Risk is a funny concept. It’s always there in our lives, whatever we do, to a greater or lesser extent. The odd thing is that whilst we are sometimes very aware of risk, at other times we tend to forget all about it. Witness the number of people who step backwards off cliffs taking selfies. We also have a skewed perception of what is actually dangerous and what isn’t. Take flying as an example. Compared with driving, which is far more likely to kill us, flying is statistically safer. But most people don’t fly very often, so never really get used to it and we’re also in someone else’s hands and the situation is almost totally out of our control. So how does risk play a part in our riding decisions? What skews our concept of risk?

More than anything else, what interferes with accurate risk assessment is familiarity. The more often we encounter a risk, yet nothing goes wrong, the less we see it AS a risk. If we drive or ride on a regular basis, in situations we are familiar with, we generate such a level of familiarity and a sensation of ‘ordinariness’, we begin to lose awareness of the risks. Worse, we begin to believe we are in control of the risks.

But is that actually the fact? We should be aware of another factor that could be keeping us safe.

And that’s statistics. Crashing badly is rare event.

What do I mean? You’ll probably have heard that the risk of being killed on a motorcycle or scooter is around 30 to 40 times higher than if we’re in a car. And you probably know there are (very approximately) around 350 fatal motorcycle crashes in the UK each year, and that serious injuries (equally approximately) total around 3500.

But those numbers need context.

There are somewhere between 1 and 2 million active motorcyclists who ride several billion miles each year.

So for you and me, when we look at motorcycling on an individual basis, the chance of having a fatal accident in any one year is tiny. The UK is one of the safest places on earth to ride a motorcycle.

I originally wrote this article under the misapprehension – like most people in the advanced riding community, and in road safety generally – that it is good skills that keep us safe. I wrote about how I thought road users including motorcyclists go through a sequence of developmental stages of hazard perception, risk awareness and risk management:

Level 1) we aren’t even aware danger exists
Level 2) we see a hazard but don’t understand how it poses a risk
Level 3) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk but don’t know how to deal with it
Level 4) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and react by taking appropriate avoiding action
Level 5) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and respond by proactively reducing the risk
Level 6) we anticipate a hazard, and act to eliminate the risk before it can develop

I described those levels in terms of how a rider might respond in the most common collision scenario – the SMIDSY crash involving a driver emerging from a junction on the left.

1) we aren’t even aware danger exists
How would a rider at this level of development rider respond if a car started to emerge from the side turning? Simple answer – having failed to recognise the scenario as a hazard, the rider will be caught completely by SURPRISE! by the emerging car. There will be no planned response to the hazard. The outcome is entirely in the lap of the gods.

2) we see a hazard but don’t understand how it poses a risk
How would this rider respond to an emerging car? The rider may have realised that cars emerge from side turnings, but assumes that as the bike has right of way, the car driver will see the bike and wait. The rider will still be caught completely by SURPRISE! by the emerging car, there will be no planned response and the outcome is still with the gods.

3) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk but don’t know how to deal with it
Perhaps the rider has learned from some previous incidents but what missing now is any form of planned response. Maybe the rider develops excessive caution (perhaps avoiding ‘dangerous’ roads), slows down excessively ‘just in case’, or maybe crashes taking evastic action. The rider is no longer taken by SURPRISE! but there’s no planned strategy to get out of trouble.

4) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and react by taking appropriate avoiding action
Now the rider is capable of basic defensive riding and collision avoidance. This is essentially the level aimed at by basic training. The rider will detect the emerging car, and go into a routine to deal with the problem – perhaps slowing down and sounding the horn, whilst being ready to make an effective emergency stop or swerve.

5) we see a hazard, recognise it poses a risk, and respond by proactively reducing the risk
This is essentially the level aimed at by advanced training. Having spotted the junction ahead, the rider will respond PRO-ACTIVELY by slowing to reduce stopping distance, changing position to open up lines-of-sight and introduce a ‘safety space’ before the driver even begins to create a threat by starting to emerge. The essential step is to move from being a reactive rider (who responds AFTER the threat develops) to a pro-active rider (who takes preemptive steps to reduce risk) by constantly asking the “what if…?” question and having a “then this…!” answer ready. This stage is often marked by an attitudinal change. Rather than relying on the other driver to see and respond to the bike (“I have right-of-way”, “the driver should look harder for bikes”) the rider now begins to understand that “it takes two to tangle” – if the driver’s error sets up the POTENTIAL for a collision, the biker still has to ride into it to COMPLETE the collision. After a scary experience, this rider will probably ask “what else could I have done to avoid the situation?”

6) we anticipate a hazard, and act to eliminate the risk before it can develop
This is the next level where the rider has developed ‘insight’, and is the level Survival Skills advanced rider training courses aim to reach. We don’t have to wait until we see a junction. We can anticipate that ANY BLIND AREA – or ‘Surprise Horizon’ – could be concealing a vehicle about to emerge into our path, and we anticipate we haven’t been seen, and take appropriate steps – change of speed, change of line, ‘setting-up’ the brakes – before we even see a vehicle. Or pehaps we see a car still APPROACHING a junction and we consider strategies such as a slight increase in speed to get clear of the junction before the car gets there. And should emergency action still be needed, we are not just ready to brake hard or swerve but have already identified possible escape routes.

With my old CBT instructor hat on, novice riders on CBT are usually in Level 1, particularly if they have car experience because the lessons learned on four wheels do not apply to two.

So where does motorcycle training take us? In theory, a rider with a CBT certificate should be up at Level 4, but in reality, they’re far more likely to hover between 2 (blind faith) and 3 (luck) because there’s too much to cover on CBT to develop anything like proper defensive riding.

Donning my old Direct Access hat, riders at Level 2 would accumulate ‘serious’ faults on the bike test, and riders at Level 3 would pick up minor ‘driving’ faults. So my aim was to get riders to at least Level 4 where they could react reliably to most hazards and get a clean sheet. But if I had time and the trainee was receptive enough, I’d begin to introduce Level 5 thinking where they started to understand how to ‘get their retaliation in first’ by being pro-active in attempting to distance themselves from harm.

And with my post-test headgear in place, I’d definitely want to see Level 5 and preferably Level 6 thinking going on.

What if we don’t take post-test training? Given time and some ‘learning-by-experience’ forced on the rider by a couple of crashes in the ‘School of Hard Knocks’, it is possible to climb to Level 5. There are some very competent motorcyclists out there who have never taken post-test training. We just have to be self-critical and willing to advance.

But even if we do take higher training, there’s no guarantee it will stick. When I wrote the original version of this article, I noted that “unfortunately having passed beyond the sight of the trainer and examiner, many riders slip back to Level 3.” I was thinking in terms of basic training, but I’ve seen it can apply to riders with advanced experience too.

You’ll remember that I said back at the beginning that I originally wrote this article under the misapprehension that it is good skills that keep us safe, so at the time I’d thought this was just the natural erosion of skills and learning that happens as the memories of our training slip further into the distance. That has an effect, of course, but I’d actually hit on the really significant problem when I concluded:

“They stop planning ahead and trust to luck again.”

Why do we do this? It’s that skewing of risk that results from familiarity. The more often we encounter a risk, yet nothing goes wrong, the less we see it. Go back to the KSI stats. Out of those 350 fatal crashes every year, something under 100 happen at junctions. Let’s just make that absolutely clear. With over one million riders covering several billion miles annually, and passing uncounted junctions every single day, in the course of a year just 100 fatalities happen at junctions. The vast majority of us pass junctions perfectly safely all year long. And because things so rarely go wrong it’s easy to begin to believe that it’s our own abilities keeping us safe when the fact is it’s statistics doing the job. Without being aware of it, we are ‘trusting to luck’. And the same issue arises with every other activity on a motorcycle including the two other big killers – cornering crashes and overtaking incidents.

A former police instructor once told me that

“Done right, overtaking is perfectly safe”.

Of course it’s not. There’s always risk. It’s only when we constantly ask ourselves “what if this goes wrong?” that we are in a position to manage risk effectively. The more vivid our imagination, the more likely we are to have a realistic perception of risk. The better our technique, the less risk SHOULD be involved…

…but what if we simply use our skills to take more overtakes? What if we use them to make technically tricky passes? Haven’t we just upped the risk whilst pretending that we’re managing that risk effectively?

We think it’s our skill preventing a crash when in fact, the dice just haven’t rolled the wrong way…

…yet.

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18. Staying awake

If anything, this article was another to pick up a riding issue well before it became better known. Drowsiness remains one of the most consistently underestimated risk factors in road safety, particularly among private motorists and motorcyclists, and we can fall asleep anywhere. Prof. Jim Horne’s research was at the time I reported hot off the press, but now there’s a deeper body of evidence backing up his work. The central premise — that sleepiness kills more people than drink-driving — is broadly consistent with the research base then and now, as modern studies continue to show that fatigue is strongly associated with serious and fatal collisions and still under-reported. Yet the cultural blind spot — acknowledging drink-driving risk but dismissing fatigue — is still very real.

02:00–06:00 remains the highest-risk window and the mid-afternoon dip is well established between 13:00–15:00. The observation that riders feel tired well before control degrades, underestimate how badly they are performing, and push on because “we’re nearly there”, is strongly supported by human-factors research. It’s a danger on group rides, and I have experienced it myself, because experienced riders — who often volunteer to lead — often underestimate how tired other riders are, and because nobody wants to be the rider to stop the group. The phenomenon of micro-sleeps remains one of the most misunderstood fatigue mechanisms, and the “long blink” warning is accurate. Caffeine can temporarily improve alertness, but it does not reverse sleep debt. One modern insight worth adding is that fatigue is cumulative and many riders start long journeys already impaired. It strengthens the “planning matters” argument, before the key is turned. We can fall asleep anywhere.

Staying Awake

This article was first written in the early 2000s, and was prompted by research by Professor Jim Horne of Loughborough University’s Sleep Research Centre. His findings indicated that more people are killed on UK roads due to sleepiness than through drinking and driving. Whilst we generally think of monotonous roads such as motorways are as the problem areas, because of the high speeds and serious consequences are often serious, we can fall asleep anywhere. Whilst bus, truck and coach drivers are strictly monitored, drivers and riders are particularly at risk because there are no rules which regulate the amount we can drive or ride. And as a group, motorcyclists seem to be blissfully unaware of the problems.

So why do we have problems staying awake? The obvious one is spending too long on the road at any one time. I discovered it was a particular issue in New Zealand, because towns are far apart and the roads are slow, but clearly if we’re riding from London to Edinburgh, that’s a long way and if we attempt it in one hit, we will get physically tired and sleepy.

Less obvious are the body’s natural biorhythms. We are programmed to fall asleep at certain times. Not surprisingly the highest risk time is between 2am and 6am, but fewer people are aware there is a similar period between 12am and 4pm, which is made worse if you have had a heavy meal or if you are an older driver. Shiftworkers are particularly at risk because their sleep patterns are disrupted.

So first and foremost, we should try to avoid the risk of getting sleepy in the first place. And that means planning a journey to avoid excessive daily mileages. We should also factor in breaks. At least fifteen minutes in every two hours is recommended, but regular longer breaks are a good idea, with a nap as needed when we start to feel sleepy. And avoid heavy meals during breaks and strong coffee or ‘energy’ drinks. The former divert blood to the digestive system away from the brain, and the latter only provide a very limited, short term lift.

So how do we know we’re at risk? We get some early warning. Simulator research shows a driver will often start to feel sleepy around forty minutes before the real problems occur, but typically we try to ride through this stage rather than pull over and take a break, frequently because we’re close to the end of our journey. At the same time, we don’t realise how badly we are riding, even though others often notice. Witnesses to accidents involving a dozing driver often report that the vehicle was being driven erratically before the accident occurred.

As soon as we realise we’re getting tired, we should stop as soon as it is safe. If you are on the motorway, don’t push on to the next service area, pull off at the next exit. Common ‘cures’ such as opening the windows / flipping up the visor, singing to ourselves or turning the stereo up loud don’t seem to work.

The next stage is something called ‘micro-sleep’, where we doze off for a second or two. Ever had that really disconcerting ‘long blink’ when you suddenly discover the truck ahead is no long three or four seconds away but right in front of the wheel? That’s a micro-sleep.

If we start to be concerned about keeping our eyes open, then stop IMMEDIATELY, even on the motorway. The hard shoulder is for emergency use and in my opinion this is an emergency. Although the police might not interpret it that way, if you get off the bike and kick the tyres or something, even a five minute stop should wake you up enough to get safely to the next exit, where you can leave and take a proper break.

It’s likely that tiredness-related problems are at the root of some seemingly-inexplicable group riding crashes. I know that I had a crash on one of my rides that was fatigue-related. The rider had started early because he’d had a long way to ride. I had tried to cover too many miles on the road and hadn’t factored in sufficient breaks. With around forty minutes to the end of the ride, he lost concentration on a bend and went off the road. He was unhurt but the bike was a write-off. So if you’re organising a ride, watch for signs. And if you’re in a group ride and YOU start to feel sleepy, stop the entire group rather than try to push on to avoid inconveniencing everyone else.

And finally, just in case you think you can’t fall asleep on a bike, you can! It happened to me years ago when I was a courier.

It was a hot summer’s day, around 3pm. I’d been riding since about 9am with just a couple of short breaks and had just passed the last exit before a 20 mile stretch of the M26/M25 where there is no exit, when I started to feel really sleepy. I knew I was riding badly, and then I experienced a micro-sleep. I suddenly found myself about five metres behind a truck.

But I carried on. I lifted the visor, started trying to sing myself away, and made the mistake of trying to push on to the next exit because of that rule about not stopping on the hard shoulder.

Bad move… five minutes later I found myself riding diagonally across the hard shoulder, heading for a grass embankment and with the left hand indicator on.

The weird thing was I could remember a little dream of seeing the exit ahead. This time I stopped, got off the bike and took my helmet off, walked around and jumped up and down for a few minutes before getting back on the bike and pulling off at the next exit. I found a stretch of grass beside the road, and had a kip for half an hour. That way, both rider and parcel made it to their destination, just a few minutes late.

I posted this story to a motorcycling group elsewhere. To my surprise, few people took the danger of drowsiness whilst riding at face value and hardly anyone considered it as a real (or even potential) problem.

A scary number came up with a “I get tired but I continue to ride/drive whilst singing/looking around/jumping up and down and that works for me” rationale. One very experienced rider claimed, he could tell non-dangerous tiredness from dangerous tiredness. Yeah, right.

The interesting thing is that the report highlighted that people do not see driving whilst tired as a high risk activity, and here was a group of experienced riders responding in exactly the way the report predicted.

My guess is that what’s happened is that they have driven or ridden many times whilst tired and got away with it. So they dismiss the dangers as negligible, despite solid evidence to the contrary. It’s the same “I can handle it” attitude that drink drivers habitually use to excuse their behaviour, right up to the day they fail to handle it. I guess we need a lot of educating before we believe the dangers of our behaviour.

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17. Staying Warm on two wheels

Physics doesn’t change. Only our understanding of the principles does. Given how long ago I wrote this article, it has not just stood up well to the passage of years, I’d venture to say that it was is quietly ahead of its time, at least in the world of motorcycling: the emphasis on core temperature, cognition and risk perception, and decision-making, rather than just comfort, aligns very closely with how cold-weather risk is framed today in both occupational safety and human-factors research. Hypothermia is insidious and often unrecognised and framing getting cold as a decision-making and control problem is crucial, and extends far beyond a comfort issue, something still under-emphasised in mainstream motorcycling advice. That reinforces why riders underestimate cold-related risk. The central insight — cold hands are a symptom of falling core temperature — is the core of the article and scientifically valid as is the explanation of insulation as rate-of-loss reduction rather than heat retention. This is a mistake riders still make even today, relying on layering too much.

Where I writing the article today, I would point out that much of my critique of heated grips is fair, but they are more reliable and somewhat more effective than the ones I struggled with back in my courier days, but they are still more useful as a supplement to heated clothing, but not a solution, particularly on a long ride.

Staying Warm on two wheels

Motorcycles and cold weather aren’t entirely compatible. Whilst the biggest winter risk to riding in the UK is ice, the subtle disorientation caused by hypothermia isn’t that far behind. The wind chill factor is considerable on a bike, and the hands are stuck out in the wind. They also have a large surface area to lose heat from, and so are the first part of the body that we notice getting cold. Unfortunately, because gloves still need to allow us to operate the controls, they are also probably the most difficult part of the body to keep warm. Over the years, I tried all sorts of ways of keeping my hands warm. I tried some pretty expensive kit as well as ideas I knocked up myself for nothing. So have a read, learn from my experience, and before you dash out and spend big cash too, don’t make the same mistakes I did.

In an attempt to keep my hands warm I’ve tried:-

thick gloves
thermal gloves
World War 2 flying gloves (really!)
skiing gloves
silk inner gloves
thermal inners
overmitts
handlebar muffs
cut down milk containers
heated inners
heated handlebar grips

But before I discuss how well they worked – or didn’t work – let’s consider just why hypothermia isn’t uncommon when riding a bike.

Heat is lost from the body by three routes:

radiation
convection
conduction

Fairly obviously, the blood flows out down our arms and legs to hands and feet, and back to the heart. But when it’s cold, the blood passing down arms and legs is cooled by the windblast – their large surfaces act as radiators – and returned to the core of the body. Now it has to be re-heated before being pumped round the body again. The body can cope with mild cooling – it just turns up the heat by burning more fuel – but there’s a limit. Once we start losing heat faster than the body’s self-warming process can cope with, we start losing heat from the body’s core. And the steeper the temperature gradient (ie, how cold it is), the faster we chill.

Now, we don’t really feel any of that, but what we feel is the next stage. As our core temperature starts to fall, the circulation of warm blood to the surface capillaries begins to shut down to reduce further heat loss. Skin feels cold to the touch. Go a stage further and the blood supply to the body’s extremities also starts to shut down – now it’s not just skin that’s cold, but our hands and feet, and eventually even our arms and legs.

What are the effects of this chilling? When are arms and legs get cold, the muscles operating our fingers, hands and feet become stiff and unresponsive. And we start to struggle to control the bike. I remember one icy ride from London to Kent when I couldn’t actually change gear for the last ten minutes.

That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. We also lose heat through our neck and head, and that means the brain is affected too. We start losing focus and making bad decisions.

So that’s hypothermia. And it sets in surprisingly easily on a bike. If you’ve ever reached the stage of shivering uncontrollably, you’re in the early stages of hypothermia. . This is not idle speculation – this comes straight from sports physiology research.

So what was the mistake I made? It’s pretty obvious when you read the list above – they were all attempts to keep my hands warm. Unfortunately, that’s treating the SYMPTOMS rather than the DISEASE.

Let’s just recall what thermally-insulated clothing does. We think of it as ‘retaining’ heat, but that’s not actually how it works. It SLOWS DOWN the rate of heat loss.

So here are two points to think about:

thermal insulation only works up to the point where the temperature gradient across the insulation is steep enough for the rate of heat loss to exceed the body’s ability to heat itself. Once temperatures dip low enough, from that point on, we are going to chill. For clothing with good thermal insulation, that threshold temperature is lower.

if we only ride short distances, thermal insulation may slow down the rate of heat less enough that we don’t notice the chilling effect of cold weather. But on a longer ride in the same clothing, we will continue to lose heat for as long as we’re riding, and then all that our thermal clothing can do, no matter how good it is, is to delay the onset of chilling. It prolongs the agony, as it were. This is a serious problem if you are habitually a short distance rider and suddenly do a long trip. It took me years to understand why the clothing that kept me nice and warm on short rides let me get so cold on long runs.

So the key point is that whilst moderately chilly weather may be tolerable for short rides, as soon as the temperature really dips or we take a long ride, we’re going to chill. Circulation to the arms, legs and brain are all reduced, and eventually we’ll lose our mental focus too.

One obvious solution is to keep adding thermal insulation until we stay toasty. That’s the idea behind ‘layering’. But after a bit, thick gloves with inners get too bulky to be easy to use, and we end up looking like the Michelin Man – try looking over your shoulder!

So let’s step backwards a bit, and recall that if we keep the core temperture high, blood keeps circulating. But how can we supplement the body’s own ability to supply enough extra heat?

Well, the obvious solution if hands are cold is to use something to heat the hands – heated grips and gloves . But remember – this is the symptom, not the disease. They might make our fingers feel warm but they are very inefficient – most of the heat produced is lost again, either by conduction down the metal bars or radiation from the back of the glove. My experience is that I still got physically cold even if my fingers felt warm, probably because the warm fingers ‘fool’ the brain into opening up capillaries to blood flow, which then loses heat. And as a secondary problem, I’ve found heated grips and gloves fail very quickly because of the constant flexing. I generally reckoned on a year for heated grips before the wiring failed and one winter for the gloves, sometimes just a couple of months. It’s the heating elements that go in gloves and the feed wire on the throttle side with grips.

So can we heat the core directly? We can, by using heated clothing. A heated jacket or waistcoat adds heat where it’s needed, and given the same insulation, the result is that we push the point where we start to chill to a lower temperature. With core temperature maintained, so is circulation to the extremities and so hands and feet get a constant supply of warm blood.

In my experience of riding through really cold weather – I was a blood runner for several years, being called out at all hours of the night including in mid-winter – a heated waistcoat may not completely overcome the cooling effect but goes a long way towards it – on one 3am ride in January when it was -10c, my fingers still got cold but they didn’t go numb. I would have struggled to complete the ride without the waistcoat. I’ve found that if it’s chilly (10 – 5C) wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a light fleece then my heated waistcoat keeps me warm. If it’s cold (around 0) I wear the fleece over the waistcoatr. Below zero, I put unlined waterproofs over my riding suit, and that is sufficient to deal with a three hour riding down to about -10C.

Heated waistcoats are available for around £100 and my experience is also that they last much longer. My first Gerbing waistcoat lasted a decade, and my replacement from Exo2 is even older. Only the oldest bikes will have problems with a waistcoat – they draw no more than about 30 watts – half a halogen headlight bulb. It’s also possible to daisy-chain heated gloves, socks, leggings and collars from some manufacturers, but make sure your bike’s alternator can cope with all that lot.

Personally, I’d avoid a heated jacket. You can wear a heated waistcoat under several layers of insulation BEFORE putting a jacket on – you can’t do this if the heating element is built in to the jacket.

Final tip – plug the leaks! Keep wind out of your clothing by tightening wrist straps, using a scarf or neckwarmer and zipping jackets to trousers or wearing one-piece suits. Several thin layers are better than one thick one, unless it is a fleece – the idea is to trap air and stop it moving. If you have a separate jacket, bib-and-brace type trousers help keep the kidneys warm. A cheap one piece rain suit over the top will do wonders if you have separate jacket and jeans.

And a word of warning – don’t put the heated waistcoat next to the skin – the heating element can get pretty hot and you will end up looking like you barbecued yourself! You can get inline temperture controllers, or just wire in a simple on-off switch on the bike’s dash. Don’t forget to fit an inline fuse to avoid self-immolation.

If you want to stay warm on a bike this winter, spend some smart money on a heated waistcoat!

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16. A Moment of Inattention? Or a lack of attention to fixing problems?

A universal and ongoing challenge in motorcycling is understanding how human instinct, fear, and attention interact with skill under real-world stress, what’s now referred to as ‘human factors’. Even experienced riders can find themselves in situations where instinct and fear override skill. This article explores a real-world braking emergency to illustrate how inattention, poor anticipation, and stress responses interact, why emergency skills alone aren’t enough, and how proactive hazard assessment and mindset can prevent dangerous situations before they occur. The article’s core message — that accidents often result from cognitive and attentional failures rather than purely technical deficiencies — remains as relevant today as ever and explains why neuroscience matters to motorcyclists.

A Moment of Inattention? Or a lack of attention to fixing problems?

The following was posted in a discussion group by a friend of mine, Don Kime, an instructor in the States. What can be learned? The rider identifies some of the problems for himself. So why’s he not done something about sorting it out? And here’s the really scary bit: “Here we go again.” So he’s been in this position before. What’s he not learned from the previous incidents?

“More harrowing braking experiences. This is beginning to scare me. I just got back from a ride and was on a two lane, fairly straight and wide, country road. I was following a pickup doing somewhere around 75mph. He was about four car lengths or more ahead of me. I was just enjoying the ride, as usual. Next thing I know all I see is brake lights and I am closing on his tail gate fast. Here we go again.

“I immediately get down on both brakes, and the back wheel promptly locks up. At first I am not really sure which wheel is sliding until the back end starts to wag back and forth. At this point I know I need to be squeezing the front brake harder than I am, but for some reason I am afraid I am going to slide the front wheel and loose control. In retrospect, I don’t think I was anywhere near loosing traction on the front. I am in the grips of fear and (again) fixated on the tail gate of the truck.

“For a moment I am sure I am not going to be able to stop in time, but I feel like I can at least get my speed down before I impact. I continue on the front brake with the rear locked. I know I should have released the rear, but at the moment there was no way I was going to let off either brake. I managed to bear down a bit harder on the front once I realized that it was the rear that was sliding and not the front. I brought the bike to a stop about 10ft behind the truck in a cloud of smoke from my rear tire. (I flat spotted the heck out of my new Macadam!)

“The pickup had just stopped dead in the middle of the road to make a right turn (without signalling). I don’t know if he had slammed on his brakes hard or if I had not seen them when they first came on. All I remember is going about 70 and seeing brake lights and a truck that had come to a complete stop right in front of me.

I made several rookie mistakes (again). First of all, I made no attempt to avoid. I fixated. I probably could have gone around, but once I locked the back wheel that was no longer an option. I don’t remember if there was any oncoming traffic or not. I don’t think I had time to look. Second, I did not brake the front wheel aggressively enough. My first instinctive reaction was to jam down the brake pedal which resulted in the rear wheel slide and making me panic. I think if I had used only the front brake I would have stopped much sooner. But for some reason, I can’t seem to keep myself from stomping on the rear brake in an emergency. Right after the incident I did three practice emergency braking tests. I was able to bring the bike to a controlled stop all three times in a distance much shorter than what I had just done. But I was not in a real emergency situation.

Something happens to my brain when I am in a real emergency situation that prevents me from thinking clearly and braking correctly. Fear, plain in simple. Maybe I just need to practice more so it is second nature. My brain just seems to lock up in panic situations. I need to somehow learn to control my fear instead of letting it control me.”

So what can we learn? What are the issues?

Let’s take a moment to think about what the rider has for himself identified as a problem – his braking technique. Notice he said he practiced three stops immediately after the incident and managed them fine. It should be obvious that he was not familiar with the using the brakes hard. Practicing emergency stops after the event is too late!

But here’s the real problem: “Something happens to my brain when I am in a real emergency situation… I made no attempt to avoid. I fixated. I probably could have gone around, but once I locked the back wheel that was no longer an option.”

Once in a panic situation, self-preservation and instinct took over from planned riding. Why? Because we cannot easily practice emergencies! As there’s no actual emergency in a practice emergency stop, the risk is that if we don’t see it coming soon enough to brake hard consciously, our unconscious ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. These are the primitive and instinctive responses the threat, such as target fixation, freezing and over-braking. Keith Code first talked about this in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. And it’s actually a dramatic limitation of training in emergency techniques. We know what to do in an emergency, but we don’t know how we’ll react in an emergency.

So, how do we prevent survival reactions taking over?

The first option is not to follow so close. He said: “I was following a pickup doing somewhere around 75mph. He was about four car lengths or more ahead of me”. If he’d really been that close, he would have hit the back of the truck before he had even applied the brakes, so let’s make some allowance for hazy perceptions of following distance after the event, but it’s still clear he was too close. If we’re to avoid triggering survival reactions, we need to see the vehicle ahead begin to slow, and still have time to think.

How far back is that?

Well that depends on something else. Our expectations. He said: “The pickup had just stopped dead in the middle of the road to make a right turn (without signalling).” Well, that’s not exactly unusual is it? Vehicles – including motorcycles – stop. Our rider had failed to anticipate it might happen. And that means it was a SURPRISE! And SURPRISE! is the trigger for survival reactions. More about this on the No Surprise No Accident website.

It’s hard to give hard and fast distances but in essence if we’re taken by SURPRISE we can add anything from 1 second to 3 seconds to our stopping distance. That’s not because we’re braking less effectively, it’s because it takes that long to actually BEGIN to react. The Highway Code talks about ‘reaction time’ and ‘stopping distance’, but ignores this ‘recognition time’. Whilst we can certainly stop in less than the near-100 metre distance the Highway Code says we should allow IF we anticipate the need to stop and hit the brakes immediately, if we freeze for three seconds, we’ll have travelled no less than 90 metres before even beginning to brake!

What we actually need is a riding plan that factors in things going wrong before it actually happens. Read this: “I was just enjoying the ride, as usual… I don’t remember if there was any oncoming traffic or not. I don’t think I had time to look.” Do you begin to see the problem? We all tend to drift at times but a lack of focus on the riding task is dangerous. Alertness can’t be sacrificed for relaxation. He shouldn’t have had to think about looking, he should have been aware of other traffic As Don says “I don’t see this as a ‘braking’ issue – I see it as a ‘thinking’ issue”.

Finally let’s look at Don’s summary of the event.

“First, as many of you have said, unless the rider was planning on overtaking, his following distance was far too close. If he was planning on overtaking, he should have been fully aware of all traffic ahead including any sideroads or driveways or other situations which could produced just what happened. I have learned to never put myself in an overtaking posture when there could be reason for the driver to brake for an unsignalled turn, an animal, bad roadway surface, etc., etc.

“Assuming that the rider was not overtaking, it was a potentially disastrous mistake to follow so closely, but this was exaggerated by a very lackadaisical attitude toward having full information on traffic conditions ahead – together, in my opinion, a potentially deadly combination.

“I see this as 90% of the learning opportunity from this situation. Most emergency braking, in my opinion, results from this kind of failure, and I’m not sure that all the braking practice or discussion in the world assures a rider of righting this wrong. I’m not sure how any of us, including me, will react in a true ‘the collision is imminent’ braking situation. I’ve fortunately not had to find out as ‘heavy braking’ has always been enough. Nonetheless, I practice maximum braking as often as possible.

“However, it is my personal preference to concentrate the vast majority of my efforts at avoiding this situation. I personally believe that this is the only right answer.

“My final thought on this is that… with proper anticipation and attention to defensive motorcycle riding these kinds of situations do not have to be the norm. I don’t recall when last I had a traffic situation ‘surprise’ me. …and I don’t say this to blow my horn as a rider. There are many far better riders than me. I simply practice religiously a system of riding which attempts to separate me from situations at which this particular rider failed. In my opinion, this is the difference between motorcycling being a ‘relatively’ safe, wonderfully challenging and enjoyable activity and one which can kill you very quickly. At the same time, I am fully aware that, in spite of all our best efforts, there is one out there that can get any of us. That’s why I wear the gear and am very appreciative of good luck.”

My final comment is to repeat what another contributor said: “The old pilot axiom is that superior pilots are the ones who never get in a position where they need to use their superior skills”.

Absolutely.

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15. Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

Motorcycle crashes aren’t random. They follow patterns that haven’t changed for decades, yet many riders continue to repeat the same mistakes and the persistent human factors behind motorcycle crashes are overconfidence, poor anticipation, and failure to learn. Modern studies in accident analysis still emphasise that cognitive biases, overconfidence, and misjudgment are major contributors to crashes. Encouraging riders to ask “what could go wrong” and analyse their own role in crashes is a principle that should underpin all modern advanced rider training.

Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

However good we are, we all make mistakes. Provided we survive them, then do we learn from them? It’s a good question and insurance industry statistics suggest that most riders don’t. Riders who have had an accident in the previous three years are three times more likely than average to have another accident in the following year – insurance companies do not load the premiums of riders who crash for no reason! And here’s something else to think about. We don’t have to learn from our own experience, we can look at where other riders crash, and historically we still have the same accident types as motorcyclists have always had. Here are the Big Three. Collisions at junctions. Crashes on corners. Overtaking accidents. Look at statistics from the 1950s and 2010s and you’ll find nothing has changed. What does that tell you? It should suggest we don’t learn well from experience – either our own, or someone else’s.

Have you had a ‘moment’ recently?

Have a think. Ask yourself some questions.

Did you see it coming, and if you did were you able to react in time and take avoiding action? If you couldn’t take evasive action, why not?

If you didn’t see it coming, what were you looking at? Did you fail to spot the clues to what was about to happen or did you fail to anticipate the likely sequence of events and consequences of what you were seeing?

We should know by now that the most common motorcycle crash is a collision between a bike and a car. But have a think on this. If the driver failed to spot the bike, the car was almost always where the rider could see it. Riders usually report that “the driver didn’t see me” and not that “I didn’t see the car”. In fact, they often say something along the lines of “the driver was looking right at me”. So the rider saw the vehicle they were about to collide with, no problem.

So what was going on in the rider’s head at that moment? Do they simply glance at the car, then leave it to the driver to sort it all out? That certainly seems to be the case in most car : bike collisions.

Here’s another example. A typical overtaking and filtering crash occurs when the driver turns right across the bike’s path. The rider’s cop-out is usually that “the driver should have checked his mirror properly” or “the driver didn’t signal before turning”. But think about it. If a car COULD turn right, why is the rider overtaking? Did the rider fail to spot the junction or driveway? Or did the rider simply assume that the driver wouldn’t turn?

If we haven’t anticipated a dangerous situation, then it’s our mistake as much as anyone else’s. And many bike crashes are down to the rider alone. Most cornering crashes and many overtakes that go wrong result from really poor decisions by the rider and the rider alone. Even when legally it’s the fault of another road user that we found ourselves in a difficult or dangerous situation, we should be looking for ways not to get into that situation in the first place. There’s no benefit to blaming the other road user from the stretcher.

If we don’t ride in a state of mind where we are looking for things to go wrong, then we WILL be caught out by unexpected – and very much routine – crashes. If we habitually say “it was the other guy’s fault” or “there was nothing I could do”, then we are fooling ourselves and will learn nothing. We need to assess our riding critically. Yet many riders find it almost impossible to admit to making a mistake. “The corner’s surface was rubbish”, or “the driver coming the other way was speeding”.

As I mentioned right at the beginning, we have the same crashes as we always have always had. Why haven’t we learned?

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13. Practice doesn’t just makes PERMANENT… it keeps POLISHED too

The very first version of this article, written over fifteen years ago fell into a common trap. I talked about how practice makes perfect. But I quickly learned – thanks to a horse riding instructor who was took training courses with both Survival Skills Advanced Rider Training and another former trainer who remains a buddy of mine – that’s not actually how it works. Repeating a skill actually fixes it in place – it makes it PERMANENT. For that reason it’s vital to learn the RIGHT techniques before we start practicing. We need to practice the perfect! It highlights a slightly different angle of rider development—skill retention, mental mapping, and context-dependent performance—rather than purely skill acquisition or risk awareness. But even after that my ideas developed. It’s perfectly possible to LOSE skills if we don’t keep them POLISHED. Riding skills should not be ‘just learned’, they shouldn’t eve be ‘maintained’. They should be honed and worked up to even higher levels.

Practice doesn’t just makes PERMANENT… it keeps POLISHED too

It all started when I was watching an online debate about the technique of ‘offsiding’, which is where riders cross the centre line onto the other lane to get a better view ahead:

“It helped me get over my reticence for going over the white line onto the wrong side of the road approaching corners for more visibility…. The thing I noticed in France was that I could easily move to the left for a right hand corner, because then I was on the ‘correct’ side of the road for home, therefore it didn’t feel as awkward. I think it’s just a mental barrier I have to overcome.”

I’m not going into the offsiding technique here – that’s another debate altogether – but it got me thinking.

I’d noticed that when I was abroad, although I was comfortable sitting near the centre line on a right-hander (ie, the reverse of what we’d do in the UK), I really wasn’t nearly so happy lining the bike up with the righthand edge of the lane near the grass for a left-hander. In the UK, I can place the bike precisely along the grass verge, but in France I was giving myself a good metre of leeway. I felt very uncomfortable pushing myself any closer, and if I tried I began to fixate on the edge of the road to the exclusion of taking advantage of the view ahead – it was definitely a mental thing.

Holding our position accurately within the lane is largely subconscious and relies on peripheral vision – or it should, if our our attention is up away and some distance ahead. But to achieve that precise positioning, we need a ‘mental map’ of the lane so our peripheral vision has something to refer to.

Riding all the time in the UK, constant practice generates a clear mental map of how my position should appear in peripheral vision. So when positioning left-of-centre to see around a right-hand bend, I ‘knew’ where I was in the lane, which allowed me to get on with looking further ahead.

But once I switched sides of the road in France, the mental map was clearly missing. As soon as I lined up right-of-centre near the verge, I began worrying subconsciously about the position of the bike.

As soon as I realised this, I began working on moving position bit-by-bit, rather than trying to take up the mirror image position. It took a bit of effort, but I was soon overcoming this mental block.

Now, here’s the reference to ‘practice keeps polished’. If I don’t ride abroad for a while, the problem comes back. But if I ride abroad regularly, it goes away quickly. If I take a break from riding abroad – as I did some years back – then it takes much longer for the issue to vanish again.

An excellent demonstration that we need to constantly work on riding skills to keep them polished and in tip-top condition. So…

…when was the last time you performed an emergency stop?

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10. Counter-steering and motorcycle cornering

Has that much changed in the last twenty years since this article was first written? We’re told that motorcycles have gained better tyres, better suspension and stiffer chassis, but I’m not convinced. Jumping from a bike built in 2000 to a similar machine from 2025, you’d be able to ride it in much the same way. But go back from 2000 twenty five years to the sort of bikes we were riding in the mid-70s and you’re looking at a whole different ball game of dubious tyres, bouncy suspension and bendy frames. Even so, and despite increasingly sophisticated electronic rider aids, the fundamentals of how a motorcycle steers have not changed. If anything, the ability to steer decisively and accurately is more important now, not less, because bikes are so much mor forgiving.

Electronics can manage grip and stability, but they do not steer the bike; tyre construction can make steering lighter and quicker, but it does not remove the need for precise inputs. In fact, modern machines often demand better steering control; hesitant or inaccurate steering still cause problems, but now the rider is far more likely to run out of space rather than grip.

Counter-steering and motorcycle cornering

You’d think there would be enough explanations of counter-steering out there on the web, but the same questions and misunderstandings turn up over and over, so each time I find myself answering those questions as well as dealing with the misunderstandings and arguments. So here’s the ultimate Question and Answer primer on counter-steering from Survival Skills advanced rider training. The basics of steering a motorcycle are covered in the first few questions, but I answer more specific questions in more detail, as well as covering the objections futher down. If all you really want is a quickfire explanation of what counter-steering is, and how to do it, then you really only need to read the first couple of questions and their answers.

Q – How does a bike go round a bend?

A – Here are the basics:

to corner, a bike needs to be leaned over
to lean over, the bike needs to ‘roll’ from the vertical
counter-steering generates the roll that makes the bike lean
once leaned over, the bike will turn in a big circle (rather like an ice cream cone)
for a fixed radius of turn, there will be only one lean angle that matches a particular speed
That is really all we need to know. But in a bit more detail… in motion, a motorcycle cornering needs to lean – it balances the tendency of machine and rider to fall over under its own weight to the INSIDE of the turn against the force of momentum which makes the bike’s mass try to go straight on which makes the bike want to fall over to the OUTSIDE of the turn (what’s often known as centrifugal force). [Pedant alert – this article got quoted online, and one critic had nothing to say except to say: “Centrifugal force… a motorcycle would have to be pretty imaginative to balance itself against an imaginary force… people giving a “scientific” explanation of how something works would be well advised to understand the science first.”

Hands up, I’m guilty of using a “populist” term for something that people ‘feel’. But, just to keep him happy, I’ll quote someone who posted a response: “I’m a scientist who uses a centrifuge on a daily basis. I have a very simple definition of centrifugal (sic) force. It is simply momentum (Newtonian mechanics) constrained by rotation”. Thanks, Alistair. [/Pedant alert]

But to reach that lean angle in the first place, we have to make a steering input by turning the handlebars.

Q – Why is it called counter-steering?

A – Because we are applying a force to the bars which turns the front wheel right to go left, and turns it left to go right! The easiest way to remember what you need to do is that you need to PUSH the side of the bars in the direction that you want to go – ie:

you PUSH the LEFT handlebar to go LEFT
you PUSH the RIGHT handlebar to go RIGHT
For this reason it is sometimes called ‘push’ steering, and you might also hear it called ‘positive’ steering. But it’s most commonly referred to as counter-steering and they are all the same thing.

Q – Anything else that I MUST know?

A – Yes, three things:

first of all, a motorcycle in motion is straight line stable. That is, hands-off, it will always try to go in a straight line. This stability is built-in, to ensure that the bike recovers from hitting bumps or gusts of wind, particularly at high speed. This is hardly ever mentioned during explanations of counter-steering, but it’s a key point because it also means that the bike tries to pick itself up out of a corner. And that’s why we need to keep a reduced counter-steering pressure on the bars to maintain our chosen lean angle and line around a corner.
second, this self-righting tendency also means we rarely have to counter-steer OUT of a bend – we simply release ALL the pressure on the bars and allow the bike to steer itself straight. We really only have to apply an opposite counter-steering input when flicking the bike from one lean angle to the other, such as in an S bend or when taking evasive swerving action.
thirdly, the LONGER we push on the bars, the greater the lean angle the bike will achieve :: fourthly, how HARD we push on the bars affects the RATE of roll. In other words, if we only want to lean the bike slowly into a bend, then a gentle pressure on the bars suffices. But if we need to change direction quickly, then a rapid rate of roll is required and that means a much firmer push on the bars.
So to sum up:

push right, go right… push left, go left…
push longer, lean over more
push harder, change direction faster
reduce the pressure to hold the chosen lean
remove the pressure to allow the bike to return to the upright position
Now, if you want, you can stop there because that really is all you need to know! But if you want to see the sort of questions that people ask about steering, read on!

Q – How does counter-steering work?

A – You may see a very simple demonstration with a spinning bicycle wheel, which suggests it’s down to gyroscopic forces. In fact, that’s not the full answer – gyroscopic force contributes but the major forces (some 30 to 40 times stronger) are inertia and camber thrust. Let’s say we want to turn left. Counter-steering and applying a push to the left end of the bars turns the front wheel to point the right. This sets off a cascade of events:

the angled front tyre’s contact patch pulls the front wheel to the right
but momentum always makes the mass of the bike and rider try to go straight on so that the centre of gravity of the bike is no longer directly above the line on which the bike is supported between the tyres – the bike will fall to the LEFT
because the bike is leaning to the LEFT, the front tyre also leans to the left, even though it’s pointing right
the contact patch of the front tyre is out of line with the steering axis and friction on the tyre swings the front wheel into the corner – the bike is leaning left and the front wheel is now also pointing left
now the machine will turn left
In effect, the bike ‘trips up’ on its own front wheel. The final ‘balance’ which the bike settles into differs from machine to machine but nearly always requires a reduced counter-steering pressure on the left-hand bar to keep the bike steering to the left.

That (leaving out all the maths!) is what happens in a nutshell.

But again, keeping it simple, counter-steering generates the lean that makes the motorcycle follow a curved path and then a reduced pressure keeps it turning on our chosen line.

Q – Any advice on where/how to practice?

A – Find a straight, empty road or large carpark – you really need around 50 metres minimum length for this, and ideally around 20 m width too, so an EMPTY carpark is ideal. Don’t try it when Sainsburys is busy or down your local high street. Keep well away from any other vehicles.

Get up to a reasonable speed – around 20 – 25 mph is fast enough for a first attempt if you are in a car park. Change up to 2nd gear, if you hang onto first gear and shut the throttle you’ll get a big wobble with engine braking. Brace your knees against the tank, a reasonable grip (not a death grip) on the bars and keep elbows loose. Remember – the amount of effort needed to turn the bike at low speeds is negligible, nor do you need to turn the bars very far. Make sure you use a VERY GENTLE push – the amount of force needed is only that required to push an empty bottle over – not very much. Just use one push on the first few runs so you can learn how much force to use. Practice doing this a few times until you start to get the feel for it.

Increase the speed (if you have room) and feel how the effort needed gradually increases. When you are comfortable with the amount of effort involved, try a left – right manoeuvre, then a mini-slalom. This is a valuable exercise to repeat regularly or when you get a new bike to ensure you can steer accurately.

Next find a nice straight clear road and try counter-steering in a gentle slalom at slightly higher speeds. Don’t frighten car drivers by doing it in front of them. As you get more confident, you’ll be able to steer the bike harder and at higher speeds. It’s much easier to experiment on straight roads to start with. Move onto bends once you’ve got the feel. It’s best to start on a corner you already know, one with a good clear view, and one that’s not too fast – something around 30 – 40 mph is ideal. Ride round it a few times just to refamiliarise yourself. Stay at a speed and on a line that feels comfortable, away from the extremes of the kerb and the white line – remember we are trying a new technique and need leeway for errors.

Make sure your posture is nice (wrists and elbows loose, knees gripping the tank), approach the corner as normal, getting your braking done in a straight line before you get there to get the bike settled. Remember to turn in on the power, and to keep the power on gently through the corner. Finally, making sure the road is empty, try counter-steering – just as the road curves at your normal turn-in point, talk to yourself and tell yourself to push right, go right (or push left, go left). Remember, it’s a very gentle pressure and even so, you’ll almost certainly find that you turned along a much tighter line than you expected (hence the advice to only do in a bend where you can see there is no traffic).

Q – I understand counter-steering and use it all the time – but I find when the bike is leaned over I have to keep a force applied to the bars to keep it on line

A – This is the effect of the self-centering steering geometry. Most modern bikes are set up to be straight line stable to cope with bumps and gusts of wind which kick the front wheel to the side. This means a small amount of steering effort is required to hold a steady line against the bike’s natural tendency to straighten up. It also makes for a nice, controlled feel mid-corner. Some of the 1980’s bikes with 16″ front wheels oversteered – as they began to lean, they suddenly ‘flopped’ into corners. Very unpleasant.

Q – Somebody told me I need to oversteer into a corner if it tightens

A – I think they probably meant ‘counter-steer’. Either that or a confusion of terms! Oversteer is the tendency of the bike to deviate from a CONSTANT radius turn by turning tighter into the turn without rider input. You may still be applying a force to maintain a constant radius turn, but it is not called oversteering! In fact, pushing the left bar through a left turn to keep the bike on line, we’d be correcting for UNDERSTEER – if you didn’t the bike would run wide.

Q – However hard I push, I can’t counter-steer.

A – You’re almost certainly leaning on the bars. Your arms need to work like opposing pistons – as one goes forward to push, the other has to come backward at the same time or the bars cannot turn. You can push as hard as you like but if you’re leaning on the bars, you’re cancelling out your own effort. Try to brace your knees on the tank and stiffen your brake to keep your weight off them.

Q – Someone told me you can pull instead of pushing

A – Counter-steering means we turn the bars opposite to the direction you wish to turn. This is usually achieved by pushing on the inside bar, but it’s perfectly possible to pull on the outside bar too. It gives extra leverage at high speeds or when a very rapid change of direction (such as a swerve) is needed.

Q – Do you push DOWN on the bar, or AWAY from you or what? All my bike does is go the wrong way.

A – First off, push AWAY, don’t push DOWN on the bars – you need to turn the steering around the pivot point of the steering stem. Think what plane the bars move in – if you push down you only try to bend the handlebar. When riders have problems steering sports bikes, it’s almost always because they are leaning on the low bars andpushing down rather than turning the bars. The answer is to bend the elbows so as to turn the bars rather than try to push down.

Q – At what speed does counter-steering work?

A – counter-steering works at speeds above a slow walking pace. The faster we go, the greater the effort needed to steer the bike. At 20 mph, we can barely feel the necessary pressure. When I do my counter-steering demos at around 25 mph, such a light push is needed I demonstrate by using just one finger on the bars. At normal road speeds, the pressure needed goes up and it’s easier to feel what’s happening. On the track at 100 mph, it becomes increasingly hard work to steer.

Q – I can honestly say that I have never consciously counter-steered in my life and thus far I seem to have survived. Nobody worried about this counter-steering malarkey when I learned to ride 30 years ago, and it was never taught on training courses.

A – Well, whether you think you do, or whether you think you don’t, you do counter-steer. And so was everyone thirty years ago. The physics behind counter-steering apply to all bikes, regardless of age, size of front wheel or width of rubber. Older bikes certainly handle differently to modern bikes, but counter-steering has been known about since the earliest days of the 20th century. In fact, it was first described by the Wright Brothers when they built bicycles.

The reason some experienced riders believe they don’t counter-steer is simply because the amount the bars actually turn at road speeds and lean angles is tiny, it needs little pressure, and the actual steering input is very short-lived. Unless we are consciously looking for it, counter-steering is unconscious.

The reason is wasn’t taught is because it wasn’t in the police syllabus, so it never got transferred to CBT either. I used to teach it on DAS courses back in the mid-90s because it helped trainees improve their steering, and I cover it on post-test training. I’m yet to find someone who hasn’t benefited from counter-steering if they weren’t already using it.

Q – The notion of deliberately turning the bars in the opposite direction going round a tight bend is just not on

A – Well, whether you think you do, or whether you think you don’t counter-steer, you do. But if you don’t want to try out and practice something you’ve read on a web-site (and I can understand that) then get someone to demonstrate how it works. Any competent instructor should be able to explain and get you using counter-steering.

Q – I’ve been told you can’t counter-steer a cruiser / I’ve been told you can’t counter-steer on a scooter / I’ve been told it’s a sportsbike technique

A – ANY motorcycle counter-steers. Scooters, 125s, sportsbikes, tourers. Even cruisers and choppers where the bars are at shoulder height. It even works on a bicycle. Be careful on scooters and other lightweights though, they steer very rapidly because they weigh very little!

Q – These techniques are race stuff. Counter-steering is something you only do on trackdays and sportsbikes.

A – See above. The more skills you understand and can use, the better. It doesn’t mean that your knowledge obliges you to ride fast, but if a corner tightens, or you need to swerve to avoid a collision, then the techniques to change direction hard and in control are very useful indeed.

Q – I tried counter-steering just the once and scared myself silly – I nearly lost control, so that was the only time

A – Well, whether you think you do, or whether you think you don’t… etc etc. But it sounds like you pushed too hard and scared yourself! Be warned, you really do NOT need much effort to generate a surprisingly rapid response. Be gentle whilst trying it out.

Q – Turning the bars the opposite way will make the bike very unstable and it’s actually hard to do at speed. I steer by weighting the footpegs.

A – As above. Pushing down on the footpeg to steer can ONLY have any effect if the rider isn’t sitting rigid in the seat. Pushing down on the left peg tends to push our body in the opposite direction. Once again, the main problem is that we’re trying to move the bike’s not-inconsiderable mass via the very short lever of the footpeg. The lighter the machine, the more effect it can have but it’s most effective combined with counter-steering. Now even a heavy bike can be made to roll very quickly, and a quick roll means a rapid change of direction.

Q – I’m inclined to continue to rely on my instincts – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

A – Same answer – you’re counter-steering whether you realise it or not. But the benefit of properly understanding how a motorcycle steers is that you can improve your riding by being more fully in control of it. Aside from sharpening up your lines around corners and giving you more space to steer round them in, counter-steering is also very useful is making the transition from upright to full lean angle VERY quickly, which if you consider it is a good ‘get out of trouble’skill. It’s vital mid-corner to be able to change line when you realise the bend is tightening up. Counter-steering stops you running wide. It’s also a good collision avoidance technique.

Learning about counter-steering myself dramatically improved my own bike handlng skills on rural roads, and reduced the risks in town too.

Q – I steer by leaning into the corner.

A – Ah, the old chestnut. Sorry, it’s almost (but not quite) impossible! Us racer, trainer and author Keith Code has built a bike with a second pair of fixed bars to prove this, a report on which you can find (at least as I write) at http://www.popularmechanics.com/popmech/out/0102BOODWFAP.html

Once holding the fixed bars, the rider can only affect the bike by shifting his body mass to one side or the other. A quick bit of Newtonian physics will show that if we lean to the LEFT, the counter-effect is that the bike will lean to the RIGHT. Equal and opposite forces and so on. Peg weighting does exactly the same thing.

Now when the bike shifts away from upright, because we’re not holding the real bars, the front wheel is free to pivot around the steering head. They ‘wiggle’ momentarily in the opposite direction, then swing slightly into the corner, and now the bike rolls around in a curved path. With a bit of practice, it is possible to make some semi-controlled changes of direction through body steering. The fundamental difference is that we can apply far more force via the bars than we can by leaning our body mass. The important point is not that body steering doesn’t work (because it sort-of does), it’s the very slow RATE OF ROLL (and hence slow change of direction) and the relative the lack of control.

So why do many experienced riders claim they turn by leaning? Quite simple. Without realising it, as they lean into the corner they are pressing on the inside bar, and so quite unconsciously they are counter-steering.

Q – Most of the time I’m riding I don’t think about counter-steering. Am I doing something wrong?

A – Nope. Most of the time I’m riding I never give counter-steering a thought either, but it is a good thing to work on consciously from time to time. That’s so that when we arrive in the midst of an “oh sh!t” situation, we use counter-steering positively without having to think about it first.

It’s like being able to brake to the point of locking the front brake at will – its not something I do in everyday riding, but just every now and again it comes in useful.

Learning new skills is all about giving yourself that little bit of an edge. But I quite take your point about not doing it on the advice contained in a website – to be perfectly honest given the amount of discussion and partial disagreement this subject always raises, I’d be a bit wary too.

Q – So what advantages are there to counter-steering?

A – Well, if I haven’t given you enough positives already, the main plus is that once we know how it works we can choose WHEN to use it consciously and positively. For example, if we can change direction faster, we can keep the bike upright deeper into a corner. By taking this later apex line, we can see further and have a better idea of where the road goes. The later apex gets the bike upright sooner, and we can get back on the power earlier, getting better drive out of the bend. corners. Not least it allows you the option to keep away from potentially dangerous extremes of position to either side of the road – in other words it gives you more space to choose from on the road.

Q – But all we really have to know is that we ‘push left to go left’ and ‘push right to go right’. Correct?

A – Correct – which is why I said you could stop reading after the first few paragraphs. Counter-steering is a fundamental bike control technique, and from a purely practical point of view, about as straightforward a technique as anything else we do whilst sat on contradictory, non-intuitive motorcycles. But it helps enormously if we can get the technique as automatic as using the brakes or throttle.

Unfortunately the theory is counter-intuitive and that’s why so many riders have real problems accepting it’s how bikes steer.

Q – Haven’t we done this all before?

A – Yes, many times, and no doubt instructors after me will continue to have to explain counter-steering to disbelieving riders.

Q – This is all too much for me – my head hurts

A – These things are much easier to demonstrate than to explain! Check out my cornering courses!

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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.