Tag: skills

Posted on

83. Using goals to defeat anxiety

The longer I’ve been involved in rider training, the more I have come to realise that a focus on the purely mechanical side of riding (the use of the brakes, the throttle, the gears, balance and steering etc) is more or less useless without a full understanding of how, where, when and why those skills should be used. In short, mechanical skills determine what a rider can do but mental skills determine what a rider will do — and whether they do it at the right time, for the right reason, in the right place. This thinking aligns with the use of outcome, performance and process goals from sports psychology and contemporary thinking on workload management, stress and attentional control. We just need to make it mainstream in riding and driving.

Using goals to defeat anxiety

Some time ago, a rider came online and posted a tale of woe about his regular commute. It was, it seemed, all going horribly wrong. After a couple of years of relatively trouble-free riding, he been badly scared by some near misses in the past few weeks and was seriously thinking of giving up biking altogether as “too dangerous”.

OK, so let’s ask a question. Is riding really dangerous? Well, if we simply look at the comparative figures for different modes of transport then riding a motorcycle is around 30 to 40 times more likely to end in a fatal crash than if we drive a car over the same distance.

However, in terms of how likely we are on an individual basis to be killed, then the risk is actually pretty low. For the last few years, the annual number of fatalities has hovered between 300 and 350. Still too many but given there are anything between one and two million active powered two-wheeler riders, the risk’s not that extreme. A bit of perspective always helps when it comes to risk.

But even so, it’s a good idea to tilt the odds somewhat to our side, and we can do that in a number of ways. Once more, I’m going to dip into Sports Psychology by talking about outcome goals, performance goals and process goals.

Our overall ‘outcome goal’ represents the big picture and in this case it’s to get to work and to return home again. Our ‘performance goal’ is how we’re going to achieve that and we might say it’s to maintain situational awareness and an effective risk management strategy over the whole of the ride. But how do we reach our performance goal? How do we break our journey down into manageable, bite-sized chunks?

Think about a batsman in cricket. His outcome goal is probably to help his team post a big score, and his performance goal might be to make one hundred runs. But stood at the crease when the bowling is good and it’s hard to stay in, let alone score runs, that goal’s a long way off. It’s easy for it to see impossibly far off, rather like getting home safely seemed to the worried rider.

How would the batsman cope with the pressure. One way is to set PROCESS GOALS. These are the small steps via interim goals we take to move step-by-step towards our performance and outcome goals. The batsman might decide first of all to survive until the first bowling change which brings on a weaker bowler. Having achieved that, he might decide that he will aim to stay put for the first ten overs. And having made it that far he might start to aim to score ten runs as his next goal. Then another ten. Then ten more. (If I’d known about this technique myself, my-best ever batting score in quite a few years of playing cricket might have exceeded 19!)

So how can we transfer that to riding? Well, if we’re on a regular ride which is getting on top of us, we can break it down into sections. Reaching the first major junction. Getting out of the 30 limit. Reaching the motorway. Getting off the motorway again. Negotiating the rural roads to get home. Whatever represents your own journey.

The important points are that process goals are entirely under our control and they break down a task that might appear overwhelming when view in toto, into smaller and much more achievable chunks where we can focus on specific aspects of each task – maybe negotiating a busy cross roads, dealing with a known slippery corner, finding our way around a complex roundabout. At each stage, we mentally reboot for the next section of the journey.

Viewed one at a time as individual tasks, an overwhelming outcome goal suddenly seem much more achievable.

Posted on

77. Visualisation – how to improve riding from an armchair

This was another article that pulled the concept of mental rehearsal — widely used in sports, aviation, and emergency services — into the realm of riding motorcycles well before its potential was recognised. Research shows that mental simulation activates many of the same neural pathways as actual physical practice, helping to consolidate procedural memory. Paired with structured, progressive practice and periodic mental review—what cognitive psychologists call “spaced repetition”—visualisation becomes a powerful tool to maintain and enhance riding skills, even from the comfort of an armchair. It bridges the gap between safe practice and unpredictable road conditions, preparing both brain and body for situations that cannot be safely replicated on the tarmac and overcomes the limitations of controlled drills which rarely replicate the surprise element of real-world hazards. The predictability of training vs. unpredictability of the road is a critical gap in rider preparedness.

Visualisation – how to improve riding from an armchair

In the last previous Spidy Sense article, I looked at how experience allows us to develop our red-alert Spidy Sense. But I’m going to describe an incident that happened when I was a basic trainer. At the time, the current two-part Module One / Module Two test was still a couple of years off, so the special exercises – including the emergency stop – were still tested on-road rather than off-road at the special sites adjacent to the test centre. One wet afternoon, the examiner came back early minus my test candidate – she’d crashed doing a real-life emergency stop. As we’d spent a lot of time working on this very skill, I dug into the research to try to gain a better understanding of how we react in an emergency. And what I unearthed was quite scary; the emergency stop we practice before the motorcycle test is almost entirely useless in terms of preparation for a real-world emergency. The basic concept was expanded in ‘MIND over MOTORCYCLE’, a book which you can purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills]

Virtually everything I’ve talked about to date – and of course what I deliver on my practical advanced rider training courses – implies that we have to be actually out on two wheels to improve our riding. But step back a pace.

How do we develop skills for an event for which we CANNOT practice?

If the examiner returns minus trainee, there are several possibilities. The bike may have broken down, the trainee could have lost the examiner, or the test might have been abandoned. Or the bike’s been damaged – occasionally a low-speed topple-off on the U-turn would snap off a lever – I always had carried a spare for that reason. So when the instructor said my candidate had crashed and was unhurt, I wasn’t unduly worried until he told me she’d been trying to avoid a car that had pulled out of a junction and sped off.

“When the car pulled out, she locked the front wheel on the wet surface.”

The odd thing is”, he mused almost to himself, “we’d only just moved away after she made a perfect emergency stop for me.”

Over five days, Sue – my trainee – had performed at least fifty wet and dry emergency stops off-road during her training, and was perfectly competent at making controlled stops on the road too, because we’d practiced them there too.

I was puzzled too, and over the next few days, I wondered what had happened. Eventually, the reason for the crash became clear to me. It was a combination of WHERE the emergency stop is taught, and HOW the response was triggered:

WHERE – the e-stop is taught off-road in a safe environment

HOW – the instructor or examiner stands out of the way and signals the trainee to stop by raising an arm

So the first thing to note is that there’s no real emergency – it’s simply an exercise, a drill, that creates a repetitive ‘routine’. And the second point of note is that the instructor or examiner is giving the trainee a visual ‘cue’ to drop into that routine – ‘off the gas, on with the front brake, on with the rear, squeeze harder, etc.’ routine. It’s what they would have performed at least a couple of dozen times in the past. By the time the trainee met the examiner, that routine would be well-oiled.

And in fact, as the examiner explained, when my trainee responded to the examiner’s cue of a raised arm, she performed her routine and demonstrated a perfect wet road e-stop.

So what went wrong moments later?

The answer is simple. She might have mastered the TECHNIQUE. But she had no awareness of when she might need to use it. The real-life emergency that happened just a few seconds later came out of the blue and she was taken completely by SURPRISE!

Surprised, her careful “squeeze, don’t grab” technique deserted her. Insted of her learned drill, the threat of harm alerted the primitive reptilian brain, which took control of the situation, and responded with one of the ‘Survival Reactions’ I’ve talked about elsewhere. She grabbed a handful of front brake, and down bike and rider went.

If a freshly-trained rider who’s just performed a perfect e-stop on the same road cannot stop safely in a real emergency just a few metres away, then it’s small wonder that collision investigators often find that in the “Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You” SMIDSY collision, the bike could usually have stopped and it was the rider failed to deliver.

And think about the current emergency stop and swerve routines in the latest version of the test.

It removes even the tiny element of SURPRISE! that came from wondering just when the examiner might raise his or her arm.

Practiced in a safe environment around cones, where the rider aims past the speed trap radar, All the rider has to learn is to pass the trap at an appropriate speed, then stop or swerve in a reasonably brisk fashion.

No wonder we haven’t solved the SMIDSY problem!

So what could we do better? How could riders be trained to respond to an emergency that off-road training cannot reproduce?

We need to introduce ‘unpredictability’ into the training. Only half-jokingly, I suggested long ago that maybe instructors should pushing a hidden rubber car out into the trainee’s path.

A rather better answer would almost certainly be a simulator. Airline pilots learn to fly in simulators, and are put through all manner of training situations so they have an idea of what COULD happen before they’re out flying the plane and get into trouble. Increasingly, high-fidelity simulators are being used in research into driver and rider behaviour because it’s been realised that many of the earlier studies were unrealistic and “based on still photos, short video clips, or contrived on-road trials” as one research paper put it recently. We may not be able to afford a simulator with all the bells and whistles of an airliner, but even a cheap ‘three screens powered by a PC’ simulator would be a start. I first saw one demonstrated in the 90s. I’m still waiting for trainers to be offered the software to run on one.

So failing that, we can exploit a technique from Sports Psychology. It’s called ‘visualisation’ and it’s a way of using our own brain’s built-in simulator – we call it ‘imagination’.

All we have to do is close our eyes and imagine the scenario we want to learn the response to. Our imagination has the ability to fool the brain into thinking “I’ve been here before and this is what I did last time” and the more vivid and realistic our ‘experience’, the better the learning process.

Don’t just imagine seeing the car pull out and applying the brakes, ‘see’ the whole run-up to the emergency. ‘See’ the junction warning sign, spot the gap in the hedgerows, ‘feel’ the road surface under the wheels, and ‘hear’ the sound of the bike. Visualise the car at the junction. ‘Watch’ it starting to move and the look on the driver’s face as he spots us and stops in our path. If we also talk to ourselves by saying what we’re going to do to avoid the collision, and AT THE SAME TIME make the real-life muscle movements at our imaginary controls as we take our successful evasive action, the brain will memorise the events as if they were real.

And here’s the pay-off.

When we face the situation for real – EVEN THOUGH WE’VE NEVER BEEN IN THAT SITUATION – the brain will remember. It can recall the “been here, did this last time, and it worked” response.

Sports-people and other performers have used this technique for decades to avoid ‘choking’ on the big stage – the sprinter who’s used to running in front of a few hundred people suddenly in front of 100,000 people at the Olympics, the county cricketer making his test debut at Lords, the actor appearing in the West End for the first time.

On the bike, the ‘memory’ of our successful emergency stop prevents the primitive reptilian brain kicking in, taking control and grabbing that big handful of front brake. Practicing visualisation gives us a chance to respond to a real emergency with the same well-oiled response we’ve learned offroad in a safe and sterile environment.

But visualisation is not just for emergencies. Visualisation can help us recall and perform a sequence of steps in the order when stress means we we have a difficulty recalling some elements.

For example, there are a series of steps involved in performing a successful U-turn. Even off-road, trainees are often so focused on balance and moving off smoothly that they forget the all-important ‘look over the shoulder’. When a trainee had a problem, I used to get trainees to shut their eyes and do a mental run-through in their minds-eye. If they remembered this visualisation trick just before committing themselves to their once-only attempt on the bike test, they had a far better chance of successfully completing the exercise.

We can also use visualisation if we don’t ride so often. We can actively pre-program the brain by imagining going for a ride, thus mentally ‘rebooting’ ready for getting the bike out again.

And here’s a final point.

One of the biggest problems of any kind of learning is that we don’t retain much of it. In fact, a couple of weeks after training, we’ve forgotten most of what we learned. This is a psychological issue we’ve known about for over one hundred years. What makes training permanent is repetition. Each time, a little more becomes embedded. It’s not practical to expect trainees to keep coming back over and over to repeat training…

…but we can use visualisation to mentally repeat and review training to make sure it sticks.

So if you’ve completed a Survival Skills advanced rider training course, you should now have an idea just how you can review what was learned from the comfort of your own armchair – visualisation.

Posted on

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.

 

Posted on

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?

Posted on

12. Training for skills, pushing the envelope and margins for error, and over-confidence

The core principles discussed — balancing skills training with risk awareness, avoiding overconfidence, and recognising the limitations of both human ability and bike dynamics — remain absolutely relevant today. In fact, they’re arguably even more pertinent given the continued growth of powerful motorcycles, rider-assist technologies, and the wider availability of advanced track or skills training, which can unintentionally reinforce overconfidence. The key to reducing risk is not just honing our skills—it is understanding hazards, managing risk, and maintaining a margin for error. This article explores why true ‘better’ riding is as much about mindset and awareness as it is about technique.

Training for skills, pushing the envelope and margins for error, and over-confidence

Fundamentally, training in hazard awareness, risk assessment and risk management is the essential counterweight to balance training in riding skills. If we don’t get the balance right – or ignore the risk aspect altogether – then it’s easy to become overly confident, particularly as most of us (at least, right up to our first big crash) have false sense of indestructibility. Skills training, particularly when combined with inexperience, can lead to levels of confidence which take us into situations we cannot handle. It’s vital to recognise that this is a real issue. We should see training as a way to INCREASE our margins for error, and not an excuse to push our skills to the limit.

Let’s explain what I mean by asking a question. Why do we take training? The usual answers will be “to be a better or safer rider” or “to gain confidence”.

Let’s look at the ‘safer rider’ idea first. As I’ve said many times, there is no such thing as ‘safety’ on a motorcycle, and anyone who tells us that training makes us ‘safe’ riders is kidding us and themselves. Instead of safety, we need to think in terms of risk. In very simple terms, risk is:

the chance of something going wrong MULTIPLIED BY the impact on us when it goes wrong

So we really need a good grasp of what can go wrong!

That means understanding WHAT creates a threat to our health; that is, a ‘hazard’, WHERE we’ll find those hazards, and WHY the hazard creates a risk. Once we know that, we can assess the risk, and have a better understand how to manage that risk. It may sound the same but it creates a very different mindset when we start looking at riding in terms of “what can go wrong” rather than “what I’m doing makes me safe”.

And what about the concept of becoming a ‘better’ rider. What does ‘better’ actually mean?

For many training courses, it means that the trainee goes away with better ‘skills’. Skills tend to focus is on vehicle manoeuvring. This might be improved braking technique, better use of the throttle, the ability to swerve around an obstacle or techniques designed to improve cornering. This is particularly evident in track-based training and I often hear it suggested that new or less-confident riders to take a track-training day “to get used to handling the bike at higher speeds / greater lean angles / under harder braking”.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is “what does the trainee come away with?”

The answer is that whilst the trainee may have improved what were previously disfunctional skills, there is a risk they’ll come away from the session being able to use – and FEELING CONFIDENT TO USE – those higher speeds, greater lean angles and harder braking out on the road. It should be fairly obvious that there are potential problems here:

IMPROVING our own level of skill does NOT change bike dynamics. For example, our skill level does not change the level of grip between tyres and road. We may be more capable of braking harder or leaning more, but it also pushes us closer to the edge of the envelope.

EXPLOITING improved skills to ride faster, at greater lean angles or to brake harder DOES significantly changes bike dynamics. For example, we should know that if we double our speed, we QUADRUPLE our stopping distance. So even if we increase our speed by 25%, we increase our braking distance by more than might be obvious. More speed also increases the radius of a turn which means to get round a particular corner requires more lean angle, which makes it harder to brake or change direction, or even to respond to a slippery surface.

There’s a secondary effect. If we’re taught skills that allow us to perform more complex manoeuvres, then because they are more complex they nearly always have a higher risk of going wrong. For example, learning slow handling skills encourages riders try U-turns in confined areas where there’s a greater risk the manoeuvre will go wrong.

And finally, there’s no guarantee that we’ll use any of these added skills in an emergency. That’s something Keith Code noted years ago in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. He realised that even highly-trained riders revert to instinct and panic because their training leads them to expect things to go right. When they go wrong, SURPRISE! kicks in, and they suffer from what he called ‘survival reactions’ – typically, panic reactions, freezing and target fixation.

So what I’m getting at is that there’s another kind of ‘better’ and that’s an improved understanding of what can go wrong, a heightened awareness of risk, and an ability to make better decisions when confronted with a threat.

Here is a very simple example. What’s the most common crash involving a rider in an urban area? You probably guessed, it’s the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision.

So first of all we need an understanding that driver can fail to see a motorcycle even when it seems to the rider that the bike is perfectly visible. (If you want to find out more about that, check out my work on the Science Of Being Seen or SOBS for short at http://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com.) ONLY when we have THAT understanding, do we have an awareness that there is a genuine risk that we may not be seen.

Then when we have achieved that, we can put BOTH parts – better skills and better awareness of what goes wrong – together. Stategies can be put in place to manage the risk, including our skills-based training – slowing down, changing position to improve lines of sight, sounding the horn, being prepared to take evasive action by emergency braking and / or swerving.

So here’s the Survival Skills approach to advanced motorcycle training. Rather than push closer to the ‘edge of the envelope’, let’s increase our ‘margin for error’. Instead of using our ability to brake harder to carry more speed, let’s use our awareness of the risks of riding to exploit those skills to stop in shorter distances in emergencies. Instead of using our ability to lean over further to increase our cornering speed, let’s understand what can go wrong in a corner to hold it at the same angle in case the corner tightens – so we have ‘BANK in the BANK’, to quote one of the Nosurprise.org ‘Rhyming Reminders’. Instead of trying to perform a U-turn in a confined space, understand that making life complex increases the risks of things going wrong, so look for somewhere easier or perform a three-point turn instead.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.

Posted on

07. What’s the goal of post-test training?

This article was first written over twenty years ago and lightly updated since, but the central question it poses remains unresolved: what should post-test motorcycle training actually be for? While machines, testing regimes and training organisations have evolved — with ABS, traction control and more formalised “advanced” pathways now the norm — newly qualified riders still emerge with gaps in confidence, control and understanding.

“Do they know what they’re doing, do they know why, and are they managing risk?” is as concise and useful a training lens as any modern coaching framework. It also aligns neatly with contemporary human-factors thinking, even if I did not label it as such at the time.

The tension between rider-centred skill-building and training aimed at meeting an external standard has not gone away. If anything, it has become more important to challenge, as technology increasingly masks weaknesses rather than addressing them.

What’s the goal of post-test training?

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the goal of training after passing the motorcycle test. Obviously we want to improve the skills and knowledge that a rider gained on basic training. But what does that really mean in terms of what we deliver? Are we looking for perfection? Or should we be looking for a pragmatic approach to riding?

When I moderated a riding skills forum, we regularly used to get requests for help with a riding issue. In one instance, the request came from a very newly qualified rider on his new motorcycle:

"I passed my test 2 weeks ago tomorrow and am really a complete novice as I'd never ridden before I started my training which was basically 3 lessons. Anyway I bought a 6 month old Thundercat as my first bike after a lot of worrying that the bike was too powerful for a 1st bike. I want to know what tips you can give to a new rider... I'm really struggling with a few things in particular:

1. setting off I'm not sure what revs to use, and find it hard to keep the throttle steady... I panic that the the front wheel is going to fly up and throw me off

2. turning into a side road I was taught to use 1st but it just doesn't feel right as I'm very jerky on the throttle

3. which brake should I use? For example on country lanes if I want to slow down from a speed above 30 ish, is it the front? I worry that wheels are going to lock and start sliding"

Now, it should be pretty obvious that we have here a rider who has clearly identified some major problems with his ability to control the machine. So I responded with a series of practical suggestions.

I referred the rider back to some of the exercises he would have performed on CBT including some very simple straight line stopping and starting exercises to help get used to the clutch on the new machine. I also advised him to use a slipping clutch when turning into side roads (what would have been taught for the U-turn exercise, so nothing new) and a reminder about basic braking technique (front first, rear second, then a progressive squeeze of the front to slow at the required rate). I also suggested that the rider look for some personalised training to fix the problems sooner rather than later.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one with advice. I generally try not to criticise other people involved in rider training too often but in this case the response of one of our IAM observers made me blow my top. He started by offering some useful – but theoretical – advice, but then qualified it by saying:

“Unless you really do feel that you can’t manage I would delay any extra training until you’ve been riding 5-6 weeks or so. You’ll be amazed at how different it will be then and you’ll get more out of any training you do.”

Of course, there’s a very big assumption there. And that’s that our wobbly novice is still in one piece after that period.

And then he suggested that at the end of this learning period the new rider would then be in a position to benefit from advanced training with the IAM.

As I’ve said many times, there are two ways of approaching rider training:

a pragmatic ‘improve what’s weak’ approach
building standard skills to test against a set riding standard

Either are valid in certain circumstances. But which is more appropriate here?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. A client-centred course, of the sort offered by the Survival Skills Confidence: BUILDER one-day training course, is more likely to address the novice rider’s needs.

The mention of the Thundercat dates the event, and since then I’ve been told “ah, but the IAM has changed a lot”. That is undoubtedly true, there has certainly been a drive to improve standards and consistency but what hasn’t changed is that the organisation still promotes a brand of training style of riding which has passing the test as its goal.

At the risk of provoking a chorus of “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”, if you think you have a problem with your riding, ask yourself where you’ll get the better support; from an independent trainer who’s prepared to focus the training on YOUR needs, or from an organisation that commits you to pursuing their own goal?