Tag: confidence

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63. Dealing with hairpins

Hairpins are just a type of corner. True, they go on longer than other bends, and they usually involve a gradient change, but the essentials remain the same. Nevertheless, they throw many riders off their game. The article provides a practical, step-by-step guide, integrating uphill and downhill considerations, braking, throttle control, line choice, and slow-speed balance.

Dealing with hairpins

Whilst we have a lot of interesting technically tricky roads in southern England, a road feature that few of us are likely to experience until we visit Europe is a hairpin bend. In an example of how demand creates supply, after a number of emails asking for help with dealing with hairpin bends, I wrote first of all this article, then put together some routes that include hairpins for practical training purposes. Though there are hairpins in the more rugged parts of the UK, you might be surprised to know that I’ve found ‘secret’ hairpins for my advanced rider training courses in Buckinghamshire, Oxford, Kent and Surrey. Aside from the London-based course, the only location I’ve not yet found a hairpin – and I doubt I will – is Essex. Surprise, that! And of course, I also know a few for my courses in mid-Wales. So if you want a practical follow up to reading the article, I will cover hairpins on my Performance: SPORT two-day course, but can also offer a short two-hour Basics: HAIRPINS course. Hairpins are great fun to ride but can also become a real problem area if we don’t plan how to deal with them.

So, “how should I deal with a hairpin bend?”.

The broad answer is “in the same way as any other corner”. After all, the elements that make up a hairpin – ‘entry’, ‘turn-in’ and ‘exit’ – are common to all corners. A good starting point – once again – is to apply the standard Survival Skills approach, and to understand how, where and why we might make a mess of them. Once we understand that, it’s not difficult to apply the ‘reference point’ approach and my standard ‘Point and Squirt’ cornering technique to any hairpin.

So where to start?

As mentioned, just like any other bend a hairpin has:

  • a way in – the ‘entry’ to the corner where we have to steer or run off the road

  • a way out – the ‘exit’ where we’re upright again and headed for the next bend

And we can make the standard cornering mistake on hairpin; if we turn in too early then we run wide later.

So you should already have have had a lightbulb moment about the most common problem. The most significant difference between a hairpin and an ‘average’ corner is that the hairpin just goes on a lot longer than normal. Just as on ‘ordinary’ bends, if we ‘turn-in’ too soon, we are guaranteed to run wide on the other side of the hairpin, but with the added problem that if we run wide when we’re on the outside of the corner, we’re unlikely to end up in a hedge but hit a wall of rock or drop over a cliff. The latter is the uniquely scary factor on a mountain road.

But there’s a second problem. A hairpin is – by definition – on a hill. So we’re either cornering uphill or downhill. It all sounds very obvious but unless we’re used to tight corners on hills, we tend to get the balance and timing of our deceleration and throttle inputs in a mess.

And hairpins are often fairly tight so can demand the same sort of slow approach and control we’d apply turning left or right into a junction. If we get the braking / throttle timing wrong AND get on the wrong line AND make a mess of our slow control, we’ve often succeeded in destabilising the bike right in the most awkward part of the corner.

Yet there’s NOTHING about a hairpin bend that should frighten even a CBT trainee, except perhaps the height. (I suffer a bit from vertigo, so I’m in full sympathy with anyone who gets disoriented by looking a 100 metre sheer drop off the edge of the road.)

Mental issues aside, from a technical point of view, what’s a hairpin but a kind of U-turn?

The only significant difference is that we ride into it from speed, rather than start from a standstill (so we need to brake first), and that we accelerate out again rather than come to a standstill (so we need to twist the throttle), but everything else is standard U-turn technique:

  • bracing the knees against the tank to maintain a good posture, keeping the upper body loose, avoiding leaning on the tank, and having loose shoulder and neck so we can turn our head easily

  • slipping the clutch and balancing the forward drive against the rear brake

  • looking as far around the turn as possible

  • using a counter-steering ‘nudge’ to initiate lean into the turn

  • using counterweighting to keep the line tight whilst maintaining enough speed for balance

  • getting the bike upright again at the end of the turn

Let’s break down what we need to achieve stage by stage, and here’s a bit of good news. Unless we already live on top of a mountain, we’ll have to go up before we come down again, so the uphill hairpins give us a chance to practice before we come to the more awkward downhill ones. A second bit of good news it’s unlikely (except in wooded areas) that we cannot see the hairpin coming from some distance. Abroad, make sure you know what the sign for a hairpin is too, just in case it’s not so easy to spot.

As with any corner, the first requirement is to match speed to the radius of the bend ahead, with a bit in hand in case it’s tighter than it looks (or we can see).

  • Get into position for the turn itself. Just like any other bend, we use a wide approach but here’s my first tip. On the OUTSIDE of the turn (and even if your more experience mate is “showing the lines”) DON’T RIDE RIGHT TO THE EDGE. If we’re on the edge of a sheer drop, our mental focus is on staying ON the road. A couple of metres IN from the edge takes a lot of that pressure off. If we’re on the inside of the turn, using all the road is safer but we do need to watch for other vehicles (and I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Here’s my second tip.

  • Once in position, DECELERATE EARLY. Don’t rush up to the bend and brake at the last moment even if your more experienced mate ahead of you is doing that. Slowing early really is a key point. If we’ve sorted our speed early, we won’t be worrying about running out of road, and that means we have the mental freedom to drag our eyes away from the sheer drop and look up and around the curve to see where the hairpin takes us. We need a full turn of the head to do this, so we don’t want to be look round and up the hill just as we’re trying to steer. If the terrain is open, we’ll get an overview of how sharp and steep the turn is, and whether any vehicles are on the way down to meet us at the hairpin – more on that in a moment too.

Third tip.

  • Get into a low gear in plenty of time whilst still upright. Second gear is usually right on the wider hairpins, but it may be necessary to select first on really tight, steep corners. But DON’T OVERRELY ON ENGINE BRAKING – even going uphill, we’ll probably need to bring the speed right down so I’d advice using both brakes even if it’s only lightly. There’s a second reason – we’re going to need the rear brake in a moment and it’s far easier to remember to have a foot on the pedal if we’ve applied both brakes on the way up. And there’s a third reason – it’s good practice for downhill.

The fourth tip is this:

  • get off the brakes and ON THE THROTTLE whilst still upright. We’re going to need the power to drive us round the bend against the slope.

Now we’ve got the speed right, and we’re about to turn into the hairpin itself. Fifth tip:

  • Remember all those U-turns you did on basic training? It’s EXACTLY THE SAME MANOEUVRE, just uphill! Slip the clutch on the really tight ones and remember, the REAR BRAKE balances the THROTTLE to fine-tune our speed just as when we practiced slow control round the cones. With the rear brake ready to control the speed, come off the front brake, look right round the turn, and drive the bike uphill with the throttle.

Sixth tip.

  • Apply a counter-steering ‘nudge’ to get the bike to lean and then use counterweighting (where the rider sits UPRIGHT and pushes the bike DOWN) to help maintain speed around the corner itself – don’t try to ride too slowly or the machine will start to wobble. To get the bike to turn tighter, it’s tempting to ride ever-slower. But there’s a point at which any machine ceases to balance itself, and from then on, we’ll struggle to hold any kind of a controlled line. So to keep a tight line on a hairpin, use counterweighting. We lean the machine IN, but keep our body UPRIGHT. The bike’s extra lean has the effect of needing less space to turn but at the same speed.

So that sets us up ready for the most complicated part of the hairpin – it’s halfway round which is nearly always the steepest part of the turn, and most pronounced on the inside of the corner. This is where the engine is likely to bog down if we’re not driving it against the rear brake. If we are holding the bike on the rear brake, we simply ease the brake off to add drive. But be ready – as the bike comes out of the steepest part of the turn, we will need to ease the brake on again to stop the machine picking up speed and running wide. Once upright AND ONLY WHEN UPRIGHT do we ease off the rear brake and accelerate away up the hill.

So the rear brake turns out to be vital to the slow control needed to negotiate an uphill hairpin. For many riders, this use of the rear brake is the missing link.

Here’s the seventh tip.

  • In the wrong gear? Don’t try to change gear mid-hairpin because the bike will stop dead and fall over. Instead, slip the clutch – and you CAN slip the clutch in top gear if you have to.

The other common error is to try to ’round out’ the corner with a mid-corner apex and a sweeping line that maximises the radius. The trouble is, even a minor error will have us running wide on the exit, and that’s not great news if there’s a sheer drop under the front wheel. So the eighth tip is that we MUST avoid cutting into the corner too early:

  • So under power, stay on the WIDE LINE until we can see BOTH SIDES of the stretch of road leading away from the hairpin. This is our ‘turn-in’ point, where (if clear) we CAN cut across to straighten out the final part of the corner. As I said earlier, it’s exactly the same technique as we’d use on any other blind corner. And if we do encounter another vehicle coming down as we go round, keeping wide is much safer. The deep-in, late-turn ‘Point and Squirt’ line I teach on my Survival Skills advanced motorcycle riding courses absolutely works on a hairpin.

Once we’ve solved uphill hairpins and understood the need to drive the bike right round the turn, but NOT to try to accelerate too early, then suddenly downhill hairpins make more sense too. It’s the same approach. Once again, it’s all about making sure we give ourselves plenty of time to pick our line, set our speed, get the bike turning tight whilst using the rear brake to stop the bike picking up speed and running wide. Rather oddly, it’s going downhill for some reason causes a lot of riders to be very tentative with the brakes. But there’s no run-off on the average hairpin so it’s absolutely vital we are confident to get our speed off because downhill hairpins are all about ‘slow in’.

Whilst there’s nothing wrong with keeping the bike in a low gear, we MUST have sufficient confidence to use the brakes to set our speed. Even if you’re riding a BMW GS with a shed-load of engine braking, once the throttle’s shut there’s no more engine braking left. But even if the brakes are only on lightly, it’s now easy to fine-tune our approach speed, because it’s easy to misjudge deceleration downhill, thanks to gravity.

And don’t forget, whilst gravity also pulls us down around the corner itself, if we were using both brakes down the hill it’s much easier to remember to keep a foot on the rear brake to control our speed round the tightest part of the corner. Just as we did when going uphill, don’t release the rear brake until the bike is all the way round and upright again – let it off too soon and the bike WILL pick up speed and start to run wide. Once again, slip the clutch if needed on a really tight turn but don’t coast round.

Here are tips nine to thirteen:

  • whether up or down, try to minimise gear changes between hairpins. It’s less thing to worry about and if we let the engine rev we’ll get good drive up and good engine braking down

  • if we have a clear view and other traffic allows, we can cross to the ‘wrong’ side of the centre line to open out the hairpin where it’s really tight, and then pull our line back onto our own side as we exit the bend – it’s better than turning-in too tight and running wide later

  • coaches and lorries coming the other way will to need a lot of road to get round the hairpin – if the road’s narrow, it may be best to stop short and let it complete the turn first rather than to try to compete for space

  • if we’re being tailgated by another vehicle through the bends, back off on a straight and let the driver pass

  • remember we’re dealing with bends. That means polished surfaces, rippled tarmac and fuel spills. After rain (or snow) expect water to run across the hairpin, and watch out for gravel or stone chips torn out of the surface

And tips fourteen to seventeen help if you’re riding in a group:

  • ride at YOUR pace, not the leader’s or the rider ahead

  • leave sufficient space so that you can look around and see where the road goes, whilst leaving plenty of space in case they make a mess of it

  • don’t follow the rider in front, and let them get far enough ahead so that they are not a distraction, hold back and let them finish the hairpin before you get there

  • don’t copy the rider ahead but ride your own ride. If you rely on them the guy ahead to get it right and they don’t, so will you.

Eighteen, nineteen and twenty:

  • understand that if we are nervous about hairpins, getting the first few wrong will make us REALLY nervous about the rest of them. That means tenseness, and tenseness destroys control. Take the time to get the first ones right.

  • we’re heading to the mountains, it’s a very good idea (tip nineteen) to practice a slightly different style of U-turn – ride into them from speed so braking is necessary, and leave them by accelerating away. I use a ‘box’ exercise to help with this. That way we can build in some practice BEFORE we leave.

  • don’t forget that building ANY SKILL RIDING SOLO is NOT the same when riding TWO-UP, particularly when it’s loaded with gear – the bike WILL respond differently loaded and the best time to discover this is in Tesco’s car park, not as we hit the first downhill hairpin and wonder why we’re struggling with the turn.

Working your way through those should help you prepare for your first experience of the hairpin bend.

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35. Nine simple techniques to master Slow Control on a motorcycle

Articles which focus on the biomechanical inputs we make to ride motorcycles should not be subject to fashion or doctrine, but to physics. So there is very little that needs to be said about that aspect of the article, but in the last quarter century the trend has been towards motorcycles that are both more powerful, heavier and taller. Nothing there helps at walking pace. Nor does a too-abrupt ride-by-wire throttle.

What about new technology? I found using the rear brake essential to slow turns on a Honda equipped with DCT transmission and one new technology is throttle assist that add revs when the engine is about to stall and smooths abrupt throttle changes to keep the bike moving when the rider’s inputs are inconsistent. I’d say there’s a risk that it can give riders the impression that they are in control when, in reality, the electronics are compensating.

I neglected to mentioned linked brakes, where rear brake input introduces a small amount of front brake. It doesn’t negate the advice, but it does reinforce the need to discover how a new machine performs before discovering a difference mid-manoeuvre. Arguably, slow-speed control now demands more precision, not less. The techniques below are therefore not old-fashioned basics; they are core survival skills for today’s bikes, traffic and road conditions.

Nine simple techniques to master Slow Control on a motorcycle

If there is one area of bike control that really shows up our weaknesses, it’s slow speed control. We can fudge most things but slow riding topples a lot of riders. Look at the number of bikes around with bent levers, scrapes on the fairings and dinged silencers. It’s not only novice riders who trip up at slow speed. Many experienced riders have problems when they encounter hairpin bends, yet it’s the slow riding technique taught on basic training that’s needed. It’s not just the fear of looking like a complete prat when we topple off in the carpark in front of our mates that should worry us. We can save ourselves some much-needed £’s in repairs and resprays by using the correct techniques. And far from least of our concerns is that a low speed crash leaves us in a highly vulnerable state when other vehicles are around. So here are some Survival Skills tips, based on my practical Confidence: BUILDER post-test training course, that are easy to learn, simple to work with, and will sharpen up your own slow riding very quickly indeed. One safety warning – work on the skills in a nice, quiet and low-risk environment – an empty car park is ideal.

POSTURE: This is where it all starts because a poor riding position compromises everything else.

Firstly, get into the habit of keeping fingers OFF the front brake – it’s often easier said than done for experienced riders, but the first instinct when things start to go wrong is to grab the front brake. That stops the bike dead, which causes it to topple over if we happen to be mid-turn.

Next, don’t dangle feet either. I see that a lot, usually from less-confident riders, but it also seems to have become a fashion thing to ride around feet trailing on the ground. With our feet off the pegs, we no longer use our knees to lock ourselves onto the bike. There’s also a risk of stubbing a toe. At best that’ll give your ankle a painful wrench or even break it, at worst it can tip you off. Feet up, at ALL times when moving.

With feet on the pegs, make sure they’re in the right place, and that’s with the arch of the foot on the peg itself. If we have the ball of the foot on the pegs, we can’t reach the rear brake, which is absolutely vital to slow control. So position the left foot over the rear brake lever. It’s this failure to cover the rear brake that leads to riders using the front brake on slow control – and the sudden grab-and-topple when things go a bit wrong. Keep checking and re-checking the foot’s still covering the brake.

Then, with feet up and in the right place, sit forward towards the tank. We don’t need squeeze up tight, just close enough so we can brace our knees against the tank. It’s the legs that stabilise our lower body, then we can brace our back muscles to stabilise the torso. This ‘Brace Position’ allows us to keep shoulders, elbows and wrists loose, and keep our weight off the bars. Leaning on the bars destroys slow speed control. The lower the bars, the more difficult this is. Riding a sports bike at slow speed needs extra effort on the part of the rider.

To make accurate tight turns, we need to look along our path, and that means turning our head to look as far through the turn as we can. Being in the ‘Brace Position’ with loose shoulders helps the neck stay loose which makes it easier to look round. What we don’t want to do is look down at the road surface ahead of the front wheel. We may be worried about bumps and potholes, but if they’re already under the wheel, it’s too late. We need to pick up problems BEFORE we are about to ride over them and that means keeping the head turned.

SLOW RIDING IN A STRAIGHT LINE: Start with the absolute basics, because if we get this right, everything else gets a lot easier.

That means slipping the clutch. It is possible to ride a bike with a smooth engine slowly with no clutch at all – I can do it with my XJ6 easily. So why slip the clutch? Because if I rely on throttle control without slipping the clutch, I have to keep the throttle absolutely smooth. A slight tweak either way will change the bike’s speed and balance. What often happens is that we hit a bump, the throttle is twisted open, the bike surges forward, the rider shuts the throttle and simultaneously grabs the front brake. Down we go in a heap.

We spend a lot of time on basic training practicing slipping the clutch, but riders get out of the habit, so here’s a reminder and some ways to practice. Start by riding away from a standstill in a straight line but don’t let the clutch all the way out – keep it in the ‘friction zone’ as it’s sometimes called. How do we know we’re slipping it correctly? Two things. Firstly the bike will keep moving and won’t slow down – if it does, the clutch is too far in. Secondly we should be able to ‘blip’ the throttle without the bike surging forward – if it does, the clutch is too far out.

Get that mastered, then introduce the rear brake. Ride away in a straight line, keep the clutch slipping but after ten metres or so, gently press on the rear brake to slow the bike to a stop. Then repeat. Keep practicing until the stops are as smooth as the starts. And give yourself a mental slap if you fingers are on the front brake, because we’re going to need to keep fingers off the front brake as soon as we start turning. This exercise develops your rear brake control. Work at it till it’s automatic.

THE NEED FOR SPEED: Motorcycles are full of paradoxes. Here’s another. To make tight turns, riding more slowly is NOT the answer. The bike needs to LEAN and it’s MUCH EASIER to lean over when the motorcycle has forward motion – ride too slowly and it just wants to topple over. So let’s find the minimum speed that delivers stability. Ride off in a straight line, get the speed up to about 20 mph, then progressively roll off the throttle. Initially, the bike will feel good and stable, and will easily go in a straight line. Although all bikes are different, above 10 mph, the bike’s reasonably well-balanced. But as the speed drops and falls to single figures, it will become increasingly reluctant to go straight ahead, and you’ll find you need to ‘force’ it straight. Eventually, the bike starts to wander however hard you try to ride it straight. Note the speed where the bike loses stability. And keep fingers off the front brake.

START UPRIGHT, STOP UPRIGHT: It is possible to start from a standstill with the front wheel turned to full lock, and some trainers do teach this technique. But because the back wheel is pushing the bike in a different direction to where the front wheel is pointed, the bike tries to topple over. A rider with a reasonable sense of what’s happening can compensate by immediately getting the bike to lean as it moves but for someone with developing skills, it can upset the apple cart.

So there’s a much easier way. Begin ANY slow manoeuvre by getting the bike rolling in a straight line, get briskly to that minimum speed where the bike is stable, and ONLY THEN start turning. If you are having trouble starting the turn, don’t forget that even at brisk walking pace counter-steering actually initiates the lean. Only a tiny nudge is needed but it gets the bike leaning. And when we want to stop again, get the bike upright, ensure the bars are straight THEN apply the rear brake to stop (remember – toes on the rear brake, fingers off the front brake). Stopping upright means the bike is balanced. If we try to stop mid-turn, the machine will be leaning over, and that’s when we lose balance and end up in a heap.

KNOW WHERE YOU’RE TURNING: We’re always told to look “as far around the corner as possible” but where? What I do is look INSIDE the point that I’m aiming the bike for. That is, if there’s a kerb on the outside of the turn, I don’t look at the kerb but the road surface a metre inside it. The more we want to avoid something, the more it pulls our eyes towards it – if there’s parked car on the outside of a right-turn at a junction, that’s the last place I want to look. Find somewhere more positive. For example, rather than look at the car, I’d look at the centre line in the road, and use that as a ‘reference point’ to turn around. Anything distinctive on the road will do. A cats-eye, a discoloured patch of tarmac, a leaf or even a blob of chewing gum. Anything that keeps our eyes from looking at where we don’t want to go! And keep fingers off the front brake.

TURNING IN A FIGURE 8: The best exercise to develop slow turns is a nice big Figure 8. We practice turning in both directions, we practice changing direction, and if we’re to keep it reasonably accurate, we have to look right round. A common mistake by practicing riders (and some trainers too) is trying to ride too slowly (see above) and to try to turn too tight initially. That makes the exercise difficult, so we perform badly, which saps (rather than builds) confidence. Instead, start big and wide with plenty of speed. Focus on keeping throttle and clutch control smooth with the bars turned, and using the rear brake (NOT the throttle) to control speed. And keep fingers clear of the front brake. Get that head turned, and try to look one quarter of a turn ahead – 90 degrees. Try to find ‘reference points’ as just mentioned. You can use your own cones, but car park paint markings will do. Start by using the LENGTH of two cars as your goal for each circle. As control improves, steadily tighten the Figure 8 by LEANING, not by slowing down. It’s confidence with the lean that makes for tighter turns. Many riders try to ride the Figure 8 progressively slower as they tighten it, and of course that just means the bike stops balancing.

COUNTERWEIGHTING: Pull up and take a break. With the bike upright, turn the bars full lock to the left. Notice how the throttle and and clutch actually get more difficult to hold – the throttle’s stretched away at arm’s length and the clutch is tucked up in your stomach. That makes full-lock control awkward. Now, pop the bike on the side stand and put your feet on the pegs. You’ll have to ‘sit up straight’ to avoid falling off the bike. Notice anything about your grip on the bars? With your body the ‘wrong’ way for the corner, the angle of your arms and wrists just got a bit easier.

Now, here’s an extra wrinkle that I teach on my Confidence: BUILDER, Survival: URBAN and Basics: SLOW RIDING courses. Twist your backside slightly so your body and shoulders face slightly into the turn. You’ll find the first effect of this is to push the ‘uphill’ knee into the tank, bracing the body against the slope of the seat. The second effect is that because your shoulders are now more nearly parallel with the bars, your arms are at a much more natural angle, and the clutch and throttle are easier to operate. And last but not least, because your shoulders are angled, so is your head. In fact, you’re already looking into the turn. Just an easy extra twist of the neck and we’re looking that 90 degrees ahead. This is a REALLY useful tip for more mature riders who aren’t as flexible as they used to be!

COUNTERWEIGHTING ON A FIGURE 8: Go back to the Figure 8 exercise but now try to introduce this counterweighting (where we sit up on the bike and lean the ‘wrong’ way) together with the body twist. The easiest way to do this is to make sure there’s a short straight stretch between the two loops. Now see what happens when you tip the bike over further whilst keeping speed up (for balance) whilst counterweighting. You’ll find the bike turns tighter. And this is the counterintuitive key to slow control – speed gives the machine dynamic balance, lean angle gets it turning tighter… and leaning the ‘wrong’ way makes it lean more at the same speed.

TIGHT TURNS ON A SLOPE: Now halfway through the Figure 8, as your clutch and throttle control improved, you probably forgot the rear brake. When getting trainees to perform this exercise I have to remind them about every thirty seconds to keep their toes on the lever. But it’s our speed control. Why might we need speed control? What happens if the ground slopes – as the road does when making a U-turn over the top of the camber? The bike tries to pick up speed. So the answer is to drag the rear brake as soon as the bike turns over the top of the hill, before it angles down the slope where it would otherwise pick up speed. And as we turn uphill again, simply ease off the brake.

SLOW RIDING ERRORS: If you’re having trouble with slow riding, here’s a quick reminder of the common errors. Check you’re not making any of them:

Feet – dangling off the pegs
Toes – up on the pegs, nowhere near the rear brake
Knees – waving in the breeze so the body is unsupported and moving around, causing the bike to wobble
Fingers – covering the front brake, ready to make a sudden grab if the bike wobbles
Stiff elbows – the bike won’t steer
Neck / head / eyes – not looking where to go but under the front wheel
Too slow – the bike won’t turn at all
Not slipping the clutch – all the speed control is dependent on the throttle and if you shut it, the bike will stop dead and topple over
Leaning in – pushes the bike upright and an upright bike wants to go straight on

SUMMING UP: That’s enough for one riding article but this collection of techniques and tips works on any bike of any size. Work on the exercises, develop the skills and you’ll have everything you need for negotiating everything from standard DVSA bike test U-turn and slalom, for the slow skills needed to pass the IAM riding test, to negotiating mini-roundabouts on your daily commute, and right up to negotiating mountain hairpins on holiday. Master them before needing them on the road. Or do you want to discover you haven’t got the slow riding skills two-up on a loaded bike turning into a narrow, back-on-itself, downhill corner or junction?

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31. Posture – the key to smoother riding

Good posture remains the foundation of smooth, controlled riding — even with the increasingly-sophisticated electronics appearing on modern machines. Whilst electronics can help manage the bike, that does not replace the rider’s requirement to control the machine dynamically. In addition, posture affects vision and scanning: a stable, flexible upper body allows the head and eyes to move freely, enabling riders to gather information beyond the immediate front tyre, anticipate hazards, and react smoothly. Adjustable bars, pegs, and seats on some bikes allow do allow riders to fine-tune their riding position, balancing stability, feedback, and comfort but whether practicing slow-speed manoeuvres or riding the bike on the road, the principles of the Brace Position remain as relevant today as they ever were.

Posture – the key to smoother riding

In some ways, this article should have been number one, because our posture is hugely important to good control. Without good posture, so many riding tasks become tougher than they need to be, from slow control to emergency stops to cornering at speed. However, it doesn’t mean that every article written about posture is correct. For example, had anyone read this particular article on a website covering riding skills (the article seems to have disappeared recently) they might be forgiven for thinking they were doing it all wrong.

“Body Position – as many people will realise as they gain confidence and move around on the bike, the way you sit on your bike has a direct affect on the way the bike handles. Unfortunately many people never learn the correct way to sit. Sit close to the tank with your “groin” pressed against it! Lean forward and lie across the tank with your head behind the screen. Do not lean on the tank but allow your stomach muscles to support you so that if you take your hands off the bars you are still in the same position. You should try this when stationary to get a feel for it – just let go of the bars and let your stomach muscles do the work.”

Eh? How does anyone ‘sit close to the tank’ and ‘lie across the tank with your head behind the screen’ at the same time?

The only explanation I could come up with was that the writer – who’d apparently picked up this advice on a training course – had got thorougly confused. I would advice riders to sit forward on the seat (although not so close that “your groin is pressed against it” for improved slow control on tight turns. And getting tucked in behind the screen is something I’d do riding down a straight on the track. But both together? One buddy tried it on a Goldwing and pointed out:

“I could barely see over the dash, my elbows were behind my back and my wrists twisted at an awkward angle.”

So there’s a third issue – bikes and their riders aren’t all the same size and shape.

In short it was one of the worst pieces I’ve seen for a long time, and it’s no great loss that it’s vanished from the virtual library of bad advice.

About the only thing I agreed on is that posture IS important, so let’s try to understand how. Above anything else, we need to find a position that’s both stable and comfortable, that allows us to operate all the controls and see where we are going.

So let’s start with stability. We need to find a position where our legs support the upper body. Why is that, you might be wondering? It’s our arms and hands that do most of the work in controlling the bike.

The reason is that we need to be in what I call the ‘Brace Position’ to make effective inputs, whether we’re braking, steering or accelerating. And we need this Brace Position because our inputs make the motorcycle change speed and direction beneath us. Unless we’re connected to the bike, the bike may move without us when we want to stay connected – it’s not impossible to fall off the back of a bike when accelerating too rapidly. And conversely, there are time we want to move independently of the machine and unless we are braced effectively, it’s hard to do so – the technique of counterweighting on slow turns relies on us being able to shift our bodyweight one way as the bike leans the other. In particular, the brace position locks us in place to counter-steer effectively.

So the Brace Position starts at the footpegs. There’s always a debate about whether to ride with the arch of the foot (which means we can use the foot controls without moving them) or the ball of the foot (which lets us take more weight via our legs) on the pegs, but we’ll leave that to one side for the moment. Conventional footpegs are more or less under the hips precisely so we can take some of our weight through them – and that means we are not taking all our weight through our backside, although on a bike with forward foot controls that’s not possible.

But even on a Harley, so long as there is a there is tank over the engine – or a dummy tank like Honda’s NC series – there is another important connection point with the machine – our knees. Even without conventional footpegs, the knees provide the lower body stability that we’ll need in a moment. It’s also useful to lock the knees against the tank on a bumpy surface – that allows us to use our thighs as ‘active suspension’. Rather like a jockey’s legs working in harmony with a galloping horse, the forks and rear shock can move beneath us in partial isolation over big irregularities such as speed bumps, keeping the machine a little more stable as well as giving us a smoother ride on top.

Once our knees are gripping the tank, we can brace the muscles in our lower back, NOT the stomach muscles as that article suggested – if they are tightened, it’s probably a sign we’re tense. With the lower back stiffened, we can keep the upper half of the torso flexible. This is vital because it ensures we can maintain looseness in our shoulders, elbows and wrists. This is the third key element of the Brace Position, because it prevents us leaning on the bars because they are set low – as on a sports bike – or hanging on to them if they are more upright.

This need to avoid leaning on or hanging onto the handlebars and staying loose is not intuitive at all.

Leaning on the handlebars creates problems steering at speed – one arm MUST move forward and the other MUST move backwards if the bars are to turn, and the bars MUST turn if we’re to steer. Many sportsbike riders are amazed at how nimble their ‘slow-steering’ machines suddenly become when they start using the Brace Position on corners. Leaning on the bars also kills fine control stone dead on slow control too.

But leaning on the bars or hanging on too hard also tends to cause wobbles in a straight line. Common sense would suggest that we would need to actively point the bike in a straight line all the times by constantly correcting the steering. In fact, once rolling a motorcycle has dynamic balance – mass always wants to move in a straight line unless some force is applied to make it change direction and this applies to a motorcycle too. Additionally, the steering is designed to be self-centering and to correct itself if deflected by a bump. But riders detect wobbles or steering instability and believe that must hold on ever-tighter. In fact, it’s the rider’s own body movements, swaying around on the bike because they are not braced, which get fed into the bars and create the problem in the first place. When I talk about this issue on my Survival Skills advanced rider training course, I often get a blank or even disbelieving looks, which usually vanish when I perform a hands-off riding demo.

We also need to keep the elbows bent – here’s why:

a bent elbow acts as a shock absorber (just like bent knees) and allows the steering to shake. The moment we 'lock' the steering by leaning on the bars, we feed any bumps and shakes the bike generates straight back into the steering making matters ten times worse

a bent elbow allows us to steer using the leverage from the arms. If our elbows are locked, we are steering from the shoulders and back which is crude and tiring

Keeping elbows flexible is a problem with sports bike riders who lean on the bars with locked elbows, but in contrast, we can often spot novice riders on small bikes who are virtually sitting on the pillion seat. With their arms stretched straight out in front of them, the end result is similar – it’s difficult to turn the bars. Don’t forget that the wrists also need to be loose.

If we don’t have some ‘give’ in our arms, we also lose feedback from the front tyre under braking or when steering on a slippery surface. It’s a loose connection from shoulders to the bars that allows fine control over the steering. My tip to trainees is to remember the bars work like the tiller of a boat – they are for steering and not for hanging on to.

Here’s another poor piece of advice which you have possibly heard:

“Keep your forearms level with the ground”.

The rationale is that it puts the rider in the most ergonomically efficient position to turn the handlebars by moving them forwards and backwards. Think about that for a moment. The effort needed to achieve a level forearm depends on the height of the bars in relationship to our elbows. The taller the rider and the lower the bars, the more that rider will have to lean forward in a racing crouch to achieve that ‘flat arm’ shape, and that in turn will push the rider’s backside rearwards and change the position of the knees. It’s actually the need to position our knees and keep the upper half of the body flexible that pretty much fixes our elbow angle. The precise angle of the forearms is not so important as the fact our elbows ARE bent.

Of course, riders are all different sizes and shapes so there’s rarely going to be a perfect position for everyone on a single machine, but most bikes do have an envelope within which there is room to move around and find the position that suits each of us. Whilst many machines make it fairly obvious roughly where we should sit by means of cutouts on the tank and seat contours or humps, our precise position will depend on how we fit the machine. Unfortunately, few have any adjustability built-in, so it’s our bodies that have to adjust.

Do we ever change the ideal Brace Position? I’ll certainly adopt it for the short periods where I prioritise control, but at other times I’ll tend to prioritise comfort – that could be more of a crouched position for riding into a headwind on a motorways where my main aim is not pin-point control but minimizing fatigue.

Remember, it’s what we want to achieve that matters so it’s important not to look for any sort of ‘fixed in stone’ position but instead to understand why locking on with the knees to keep shoulders, elbows and wrists loose is important when fine work is needed. Once we understand that, we can usually find a working compromise which maximises comfort AND control.

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22. Springing into Summer – polishing off ‘rider rust’

The underlying addressed here — the seasonal degradation of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills and the way that confidence tends to come back faster than competence — has not changed. If anything, modern riding conditions make the issue sharper rather than softer since modern riding aids can quietly smooth over clumsy motor skill inputs and mask warning signs of rustiness. And motorcycles are increasingly being fitted with the kind of rider-assistance systems that even cover up for lapses of concentration and pour judgement in following distance and awareness of the movements of other vehicles on multilane roads. The machine shouldn’t be covering up for our lapses, and that makes a deliberate, structured re-entry into riding not just sensible, but essential.

Springing into Summer – polishing off ‘rider rust’

Winter’s finally over, the roads are dry and salt free, and the sun is warm on your back. We’ve changed the oil, adjusted the chain, checked the tyre pressures, cleaned the visor and paid for the tax and insurance. It must be time to park the car at last and go for a blast over our favourite rural roads, right?

Wrong. It’s not just time to give the bike a once-over, it’s also time to take it easy, polish up our biking minds and bodies, and rebuild those riding skills!

It’s an easy mistake to think that we can take a ride out on the first nice day in the spring and ride it just like we did on the last fine day in autumn. It doesn’t matter whether we have parked the bike up for three months, or whether we’ve commuted through the winter months. We’re not in the same place physically or mentally as we were. Even if we’ve continued commuting during the bad weather, our brain’s operating on a different planet and looking for different problems. All the skills that became second nature during summer have gone rusty and we’ve forgotten half the problems we’re likely to encounter. One thing I see time and again in the spring, particularly after a trainee has parked the bike and swapped it for a car, is that positioning – both defensive ‘dominant’ positions in traffic and positioning for a better view of hazards has vanished. All these skills need practicing before they become automatic again.

We can all get rusty. Even when I was an all-year courier, I found that my rural road riding skills fell away during the winter months, and one year, due to a change of basic training job the bike remained almost entirely parked up for six months. So back on the bike and taking a nice spring ride out with my buddy Keith, as we headed back to Oxford after a sojourn in South Devon I found myself rather rusty. We’re normally evenly matched, but now I was struggling to keep Keith in sight, and the inevitable happened. Pushing on too hard, trying to up my pace, I made a hideous cock of a corner.

I completely failed to read the bend, thinking it went gently to the left when in fact it led into a sharp and tightening right-hander. Suddenly realising I was too fast and going the wrong way, I mentally warned myself “Don’t brake, Steer”. Then it was “oh bugger” as than I hit the brakes anyway. Of course the bike stood up and headed straight for a five metre drop into the River Exe. I was lucky that there was some run-off into a car parking space to admire the view and I glided to a halt alongside the wall protecting the drop.

So what can we do about this?

Two things. The first is to give our bodies a chance to get in tune. Don’t set off on a 300 mile ‘Winter’s Over’ ride-out, without having done some shorter rides. Remember all those aching muscles and stiff knees when you first started to ride? If you’ve been off the bike for any time, they’ll be right back if you overdo it.

And the second suggestion is to spend just a little time going back to basics. Think about the sort of exercises learned on basic training and maybe on an advanced course. Clutch control, slow starts and stops, Figure 8s, U-turns, emergency braking. We can practice all those in a quiet car park.

Take the bike out initially onto quiet roads and do it alone, not on a group ride. We just need to take our time, keep speeds down a tad, ensure we’re not following close behind other vehicles. Now we can spend some time deliberately hazard-spotting, working on machine control inputs – braking, throttle control, counter-steering – and chosing lines and positions. This way we can ease back into the groove.

Talking to ourselves can help but I wouldn’t suggest a full-Monty police-style commentary on everythign. It require so much mental processing – it’s not a usual activity for the average rider – that the very act of thinking how to vocalise the words to describe one hazard actually distracts us from spotting the next. Keep it short and simple; “lefthand bend, push left, go left”… “tight bend, brake”… “car on the left, move right”. So long as we keep it simple, talking our way through hazards will get us refocused on riding the bike quicker than anything else.

And of course, the same basic principle applies in spades if we’re commuting by car or train. Our biking Spidy Sense is going to be lagging way behind. Slow down, to take time and space to get back in to the rhythm.

And if anything does get a bit scary, slow down! Minor mistakes will cause us to tense up, and then things will only get worse. Drop the speed, take the pressure off, and talk yourself into relaxing. After my near-dip, I slowed down maybe 10% – just 5 or 6 mph on thes fast rural roads. As a result, Keith soon disappeared round the bends ahead but that means I could ride my own ride. No longer chasing, I relaxed and began to enjoy the next ten miles or so. As I relaxed, the speed came back and he wasn’t too far ahead when I reached our next turn-off point.

And of course, why not think about a refresher course? You can book one of these with Survival Skills Rider Training, and we’ll head off to give your riding a service. Even if you have post-test training qualifications, why not get a different perspective by training with another organisation? You’ll not only practice what’s rusty in company with someone to point it out, but you’ll undoubtedly learn a few new wrinkles too.

 

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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?