Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 1

I’m no longer involved in basic training, but this particular incident was a powerful lesson in the weakness of ‘skills training’. There’s a seductive simplicity to “teach the technique, practise the technique, repeat the technique, use the technique”. But when we look at real‑world crashes, real‑world behaviour, and real‑world human limitations, the weaknesses of skills‑only training become obvious.

Here’s the core truth; skills-only training improves what riders can do, but not what they choose to do. And that gap is where most crashes happen. Skills don’t change how we see the world. We can only react to what we notice. If we don’t spot the developing hazard, misinterpret what we see, or focus on the wrong thing, it’s easy to get mentally overloaded and either freeze under pressure (research indicates that it’s surprisingly common that riders simply don’t brake mid-emergency in which case the skill never gets used, or the skill breaks down under extreme pressure.

Skills-only training assumes the rider will recognise the moment to apply the skill. In reality, many riders don’t. That’s why modern bikes all have ABS and collision-avoidance radar is starting to appear.

And it was no coincidence that I called my post-test training school ‘Survival Skills, either. We need mental skills to ride too.

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 1 

Some years ago, I was waiting for a candidate to come back from the Direct Access motorcycle test when the examiner turned up early minus the trainee. That’s normally a sign the trainee’s lost the examiner (it happens), the bike’s broken down (occasionally), or the bike’s been dropped and is too damaged to ride (not uncommon during the old on-road U turn – the brake or clutch levers can snap off).

In this case, he told me that she’d dropped the bike.

Naturally, I asked what had happened and if she was ok. He told me that she’d just been passing a parked car when a car had pulled out from a side turning just ahead of her, crossed close in front of her and accelerated away at high speed. She’d been forced to brake, and in doing so she’d locked the front wheel on the wet road and fallen off.

Fortunately, he continued, she was only bruised and the bike had only suffered a few additional dents and scrapes, but needed a new brake lever.

He continued: “She was a bit surprised when the car pulled out and had to brake hard on a damp surface, but the odd thing is we’d just done the emergency stop a couple of minutes earlier, and she did a perfect one”.

And that got me thinking.

Performing a good emergency stop for the examiner didn’t surprise me one iota. By the time my candidate got to the test, she had probably performed forty or fifty emergency stops back at the training school, we’d also soaked the pad for some of those, and just before her test, we’d carried out several more on a real road in the wet conditions she was just about to experience in front of the examiner.

So when I heard that she’d managed a perfect stop to the examiner’s signal, I wasn’t in the least surprised. She’d had all the training she needed to demonstrate to the examiner that she could perform them to a good standard, which is exactly what happened when the examiner got her to perform one.

But she fell off in a real-life emergency, the exact circumstance that her training was supposed to have equipped her to cope with. Why? Why couldn’t she use the skills she’d been trained to use when she REALLY needed them?

It was a puzzle for the examiner, but I have to say I wasn’t entirely surprised. After all, in pre-ABS days, riders fell off under hard braking quite regularly, even though the emergency stop has been a feature of the bike test for decades and rider training has covered effective emergency braking since the 1980s.

Let’s look at the training she’d received first.

She would have been introduced to basic braking technique and emergency stops on CBT, working up from very gentle, very slow ‘glides’ to a halt to more positive stops. Finally, she would have performed one on the road somewhere well out of the way of traffic. I’ve already mentioned how I’d covered emergency stops again on her DAS course, both in theory and in practice.

So, she should have been able to stop safely when the car pulled out, right?

Wrong.

Let’s have a look at the other factor; how the mind functions. And we’ll do that by asking another question: “what signal had she been trained to react to?”

The answer is that she had been trained to react to the sight of a person standing off to one side and signalling her to brake by raising a hand. She was looking for the examiner to signal her to stop, and when he raised his hand, it came as no surprise and she was confident in her control. That’s because we’d been practising them for days and she knew just what would happen and what to do, and in consequence performed a perfect emergency stop.

And now you should see the problem. Just like all the other tens of thousands of riders who take basic training and get a motorcycle licence each year — and the other million-plus riders on the UK’s roads — she hadn’t actually been trained to react to a real emergency. She had been trained to react using the right technique but to respond to the wrong stimulus.

I hear you ask: “surely you would have told her that cars will pull out in front of her and that’s why she was practicing emergency stops?” Of course we had, we’d talked about the situations in which she might need an emergency stop — I even had a playmat with roads on it, where I’d set up the classic SMIDSY at a junction.

I’m pretty sure that every other instructor of every other rider who’s fallen off in similar circumstances would have done the same. And of course, the DVSA’s books about safe riding covers the need for good emergency braking. But talking theory remains poor preparation for recognising that a real emergency is developing.

So, when the car pulled out mid-test, it simply didn’t trigger the mental response that would have led to the same ‘settle — squeeze — ease’ technique that stopped her briskly as she responded to the examiner. She had the skills training. But her brain training let her down.

Mid-emergency where harm threatens, we simply don’t have time to run through a logical thought process that:

1. starts with “oh look, that car’s beginning to pull out” 
2. reminds us that “ah yes, that’s why I did emergency stop practice”
3. ends with “let’s apply the brakes, smoothly, progressively and powerfully whilst compensating for the wet surface”

Skills training without cognitive stimulus training fails under real time pressure. As Keith Code explained in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books where he talked about ‘Survival Reactions’, in emergencies we revert to instinct. And instinct is often to grab a big handful. That’s why we still lock up the brakes in emergencies despite how we were trained.