Tag: training

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85. How easy is instructing?

Much of the discussion around rider training focuses on what we teach — braking, steering, throttle control, positioning — and far less on how that teaching is delivered or questioned. In earlier articles, I’ve argued that riding skill is unlocked not by technique alone, but by understanding when, where and why those techniques should be applied. The same principle applies just as strongly to instructors. If training is to improve outcomes rather than simply tick boxes, we need to examine not only how riders learn, but how trainers themselves continue to develop, reflect and challenge established practice.

How easy is instructing?

Riding — and teaching riding — is arguably the most dangerous activity most of us will routinely undertake. And yet, all too often, training is delivered and received in a surprisingly blasé fashion. I’ve already touched on the dangers of rote learning at basic level, but the problem doesn’t stop there. Even at advanced level, relatively few trainees are actively encouraged to question what they are being taught. Post-test skills are commonly delivered — and accepted — on trust.

That is not, in itself, a criticism of instructors’ enthusiasm or commitment. Most instructors care deeply about their trainees and take pride in their role. However, comparatively few spend much time reflecting on what they might learn in order to become better trainers. There are, of course, notable exceptions. I have worked alongside some excellent instructors who had clearly gone well beyond the minimum, and others who were actively trying to improve. Organisations such as the IAM have also recognised this and put systems in place to raise observer standards.

At basic training level, however, the picture is less encouraging. I have long been surprised that many CBT schools invest so little time and effort in developing their instructors once they are qualified. Even allowing for the commercial realities — the pressure to move candidates efficiently from CBT to test — better training would pay dividends, not least in reduced retests, fewer problems downstream, and safer, more confident riders. One frequently cited concern is that a well-developed instructor will “jump ship” and set up their own school. That may happen occasionally, but it is a poor justification for accepting stagnation as the norm.

Part of the problem is structural. Ours is a largely solitary profession. Once past the initial training stage, even in larger schools, instructors rarely observe one another teaching. There is little cross-fertilisation of ideas, limited challenge, and few incentives to reflect critically on established practice. The results are easy to spot: instructors still insisting that trainees look over their shoulder before signalling — a habit the DSA dropped back in 1997 with the introduction of Direct Access — or basic trainers still following long-defunct CSM manuals, often third- or fourth-hand copies of material from an organisation that ceased trading in the early 2000s.

Another factor may lie in the DVSA’s own approach to check tests. For many basic trainers, these are viewed with genuine trepidation. The reason is simple: check tests are almost always experienced as critical rather than developmental. Innovation is rarely encouraged, and deviation from a narrow interpretation of “the approved way” is often discouraged. Faced with that, it is hardly surprising that instructors play safe, stick rigidly to familiar routines, and avoid experimentation or reflective practice.

Finally, there is a cultural issue. Motorcycling has always traded heavily on ideas of freedom and independence, and that can sit uneasily alongside professionalism in training. Riders’ rights groups have often opposed further training requirements as restrictive or unnecessary. Against that backdrop, it can be difficult to persuade riders that better training brings genuine benefits. And yet the evidence is there: the introduction of structured basic training, and particularly Direct Access, has significantly broadened the appeal of motorcycling — not least by encouraging far more women to take it up.

If training is to move forward, we need to accept an uncomfortable truth. Teaching riding is not just about transferring techniques. It is about developing judgement, decision-making and understanding — in trainees and instructors alike. Without a culture that values questioning, reflection and continuous improvement, training risks becoming little more than a production line, delivering certificates rather than competence.

If there is a single thread running through all of this, it is that good training is never static. Riding is a complex, high-risk activity carried out in an unpredictable environment, and it demands more than the mechanical repetition of drills. The same is true of teaching it. An instructor who simply delivers a syllabus without questioning its purpose, relevance or application is no better placed than a rider who can operate the controls but does not understand the risks they are managing.

Professionalism in rider training should not be seen as restrictive, bureaucratic or contrary to the spirit of motorcycling. On the contrary, it is what allows riders greater freedom — freedom from fear, from uncertainty, and from avoidable mistakes. Encouraging instructors to reflect, to learn from one another, and to keep their knowledge current is not an optional extra; it is a safety intervention.

Ultimately, better-trained instructors create better-thinking riders. And better-thinking riders are not just more skilful — they are better equipped to survive in the real world, where judgment matters far more than any single technique ever could.

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79. Working to gain a BTEC Part Two

The second half of a two-parter on getting a qualification in rider coaching.

Working to gain a BTEC Part Two

Working towards a BTEC – part 2
A couple of weeks before the second practical assessment part of the BTEC, Malc dropped a couple of training scenarios over in an email, and asked for a draft lesson plan for each. My initial view of this was that it would only take a minute or two to knock up the required plan, as both scenarios were something I have dealt with dozens of times in real courses. For example, when I looked at the first scenario (“fairly new rider having problems with bends and following partner”), I thought “easy enough, I’ve run this one myself several times”. So of course, because of the pressure of work through August and September, I left everything to the last minute.

When I sat down to finish the assignment, my initial thoughts ran along the lines of:

“Don’t take anything for granted and go for a ride along a road with some nice bends. The rest of the lesson would be based on what I detect as a problem from that point on. I really wouldn’t work to much of a plan because it’s ‘problem solving’, not training to a syllabus or set plan”.

Having submitted that in an expanded format as a draft for the assignment, another email from Malc bounced back with some helpful hints:

“But would you arrive ‘cold’? No ideas of what to expect i.e. what clues are iin the information provided? Would you bring along anything besides yourself & your bike? You’ve already started to plan, like it or not, by choosing a road with ‘nice’ bends! And what does your experience tell you to expect? Look back at the clues in the scenario again.”

I began to see what Malcolm was driving at… several hours and several balled-up printouts later, I had fleshed out that bald statement and presented my idea of a lesson plan.

Back came the reply. I was close, but no cigar. It wasn’t in ‘lesson plan’ format.

Err. OK, what was it about my lesson plan that wasn’t a lesson plan? I spent a few evenings on the internet discovering how to structure my plan into the kind now used by teachers.

I sent off a second draft. Almost there. A couple of constructive criticisms, another evening of work and one final rehash and I had it in shape – Malc passed it.

As I just hinted, any teacher would be instantly familiar with the format. Every activity is clearly explained with the aims of the exercise, the time to be taken, the results to be achieved and a way to assess the results. Also listed are the resources required, right down to pen and paper.

Now you might well argue in ‘real life’ we run sessions in a much more flexible manner, because we have the knowledge, experience and skill to do adapt quickly to a ‘real person’ when they meet us for training. That may well be true, but by formatting the planning for a session we do gain benefits:

  • we can identify and work on specific objectives to ensure that learning takes place

  • our knowledge, experience and planning skills are clearly demonstrated not only to any external assessor, but also to the trainee, and heaven forbid, anyone looking at the course after the event with a view to preparing a liability claim

  • having identified the key information using the format will make planning (and training) more accessible

Where there is a clear benefit is for a relatively inexperienced instructor. He or she will have a much better chance of doing a decent job following a carefully prepared plan. It took a long time but ultimately the DVSA moved in this direction with CBT and DAS training just a few years back.

Nevertheless, I do think there are limitations to the use of lesson plans.

One thing that we can be sure of is that when we encounter a trainee in person, we may have to revise our plan based on our assessment of their real-life abilities. Although my pre-training discussions with the trainee usually get the trainee onto the appropriate course, it’s not unknown for me to have to change the course. Usually the trainee has underestimated their ability and I’m able to move them from the Confidence: BUILDER one-day course to one of my more advanced sessions. Only occasionally do I have to go the other way and drop to a less-technical course but it has happened.

But of course, I do have multiple lesson plans to deal with trainees with different needs and different wishlists. But it’s not unusual for a lesson plan based approach to lead to a ‘one size fits all’ approach to training, forced onto trainers and trainees alike – CBT is a good example. For all the recent changes which encourage trainers to make the course ‘client-centred’, the course is so prescriptive, so heavily dominated by the DVSA’s lesson-planning approach that says what can be done and in what order, that it has little room for flexibility or originality. But that’s something else altogether and for another column.

Back to the BTEC story. I turned up for the practical assessment at the venue in Newbury, and was met by Malc, and introduced to Steve Dixey (formerly of the BMF – I’ve known him online for many years) and a gentleman who turned out to be an external moderator from Edexcel. I was on assessment with copper, writer and road tester, Ian Kerr.

Initially Steve and I spent some time going over my portfolio to fill in a few holes in my explanations and to answer a few penetrating questions. After a short Highway Code/Roadcraft multiple guess test, next up was an interesting exercise. Ian, as a class one police licence holder, was to assess my riding whilst I tried to ride to advanced standard. Malcolm would assess us both. And when we got back, I would also sit down and assess my ride.

I have every sympathy with trainees who ride badly when being watched because I do too. Entirely predictably, with all those eyes watching my every move, I rode like a plank. Ian concurred and said I would have barely scraped through with an advanced pass in his view.

But what WAS interesting, given our very different backgrounds and even though there were predictable areas of disagreement on progress and comfort braking, was that when Ian, Malcolm and I compared our marking sheets, they turned out to be eerily similar. The implication was that even though our backgrounds were very different (I was a self-taught courier and CBT/DAS trainer, Malc used to run the BMF ‘Blue Riband’ advanced scheme and Ian was a trained police rider), we all spotted the same mistakes and the same good points, and had very similar ideas of what constituted good technique.

After lunch, it was onto the mock lessons where I had to to brief, observe, assess, correct and finally debrief the ‘nervous’ rider accordingly. Each on-road training scenario was complex enough to be reasonably challenging whilst nothing I had not seen before. The main problem in teaching ‘select chunks’ from a broader lesson plan is determining exactly what can be taken as ‘prior knowledge’ and exactly where in the lesson we actually are. But Malcolm’s own briefing and play-acting made it reasonably straightforward for me to determine what was expected.

Rather amusingly, I picked up an issue that wasn’t part of the play-acting. I noted that Malc’s foot position on the pegs could have led to a dragging toe at greater lean angles – there a danger that if you hit a bit of a bump, the foot can then get dragged backwards under the peg, breaking an ankle. So when I mentioned it, thinking it was part of the scenario, Malc looked a bit surprised. He said it was his normal riding style and that he’d check it out.

Many hours later, we finished for the day. It was tough enough to be a challenge, but it was also a thoroughly enjoyable day. Steve and Malcolm were efficient but friendly, our BTEC moderator sat quietly in the background and only occasionally asked a clarifying question, and it was of particular interest to have been matched with a police rider to watch the contrast in styles.

So, now all I have to do is wait for the the result!

(I’m pleased to say my BTEC was granted shortly afterwards.)

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78. Working to gain a BTEC Part One

How do you get a qualification in motorcycle coaching? Here’s my experience.

Working to gain a BTEC Part One

Soon after starting Survival Skills, I decided to look for some kind of recognised qualification as a post-test instructor. Although I was already a CBT and DAS qualified instructor and have a Masters degree in a science, something more relevant would look good on the CV, I thought. The best bet at the time looked to be a Driver Education course at Middlesex University, firstly partly because it had a distance learning option and I lived in Kent, and secondly because it could be extended through NVQ to degree, master and even PhD level.

After signing on and parting with the relevant amount of cash, my first modules arrived in the autumn. I knuckled down and got stuck into the work. With the deadline approaching two months later, I presented the work only to discover my tutor had taken a holiday just as we were supposed to be submitting the work. I was told it would now be marked too late to move onto the second module in the spring. I wasn’t particularly happy about that. I was even less happy when several of the topics I’d submitted were rejected because they were motorcycle-specific – I was told they didn’t have a tutor who knew anything about motorcycles. Hardly my problem, I thought. Eventually, I gathered a couple of points towards an NVQ, but as the experience hadn’t been brilliant I reluctantly decided to drop it and save my money.

Instead I turned to the BTEC in Advanced Motorcycle Instruction that was run by South Lincs Motorcycle Training. It turned out to be a far better choice than the Middlesex University course.

Both courses used an element of ‘accreditation of prior learning’ (APL) element for instructors with previous experience to replace traditional ‘taught’ courses. The idea is that you show the assessors that you have not only been teaching, but that you have used the courses you have taught as a learning experience for yourself to develop and improve both personal skills and the training being delivered. It avoids the need to spend weeks in the classroom being taught what you already know.

The required format for the BTEC was slightly different from the Middx course. This meant the original submission I had made to Middx was a useful background document, The main exhibit was to be a portfolio which still needed fleshing out with the hard evidence.

Sounds easy? Yes, at first sight. Easy enough to provide photocopies of my driving licence and CBT card. Not too difficult to provide copies of my current training notes. But to demonstrate learning?

Fortunately I’m one of those people who NEVER throws anything away. That does mean the office is knee-deep in paperwork and old bike magazines but it also meant I could lay hands on old notes which I used to develop the syllabus, briefing notes at various stages of development, course details themselves including debriefing notes and so on, right up to the current ‘in-use’ stuff.

First up I assembled notes from the original instructor training course I attended in 1995. I added the DAS training course I personally wrote back in early 1997 for the basic training school to help instructors pass the Direct Access assessment. I had a large pile of notes which became the drafts, redrafts, final versions and revised final versions of my advanced training syllabus itself. I had the same stacks of papers showing the various stages of development of the course handouts that go to the trainees. I added copies of other training materials such as training aids and assessment sheets. I added items of interest from from the website and motorcycle forums. I added original drafts and photocopies of items that appeared in the various magazines I have had articles published in. Finally, I added selected emails from trainees requesting courses and the follow up written debriefs that are provided with the courses.

The result? An overflowing A4 box-file on which I couldn’t actually shut the lid.

I made a date for an interview to determine whether the portfolio was up to the job and to see if I could justify the learning I was claiming. It wasn’t quite the grilling I had expected – Malcolm Palmer popped over to meet me in Oxford and spent a long evening chatting informally over several mugs of tea and a plate of fish and chips, whilst going piece-by-piece through the file. However, he was thorough – around 4 hours later (too late for a quick pint) Malcom left me with a list of what he would like included and copied for the formal submission for APL.

Now all I had to do was copy those I needed to submit, and annotate them to explain what they were and why I was submitting them. Job done, I thought.

Ha. What seemed like a couple of hours work dragged on into weeks of sifting the box, and hunting for the original files on the PC and long-lost zip disks (remember them?). Sometimes I discovered they were formatted for an extinct version of a word processor it seemed no-one else had ever used. In some cases I was able to reformat and print a copy, but where the notes were handwritten or the PC version was long gone, I had to scan then print page-by-page for the portfolio.

Eventually, everything was neatly placed in a large red ring binder and dropped off to Malcolm the evening before the second part of the APL assessment.

…. to be continued ….

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08. How far is too far?

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

How far is too far?

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

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

So how far is too far?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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?

 

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05. Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

In part one of this mini-series, we took a look at an accident that happened to one of my trainees on her bike test. She had just performed a perfect emergency stop in tricky, damp conditions in front of the examiner when a moment later she locked up the front brake and fell off when a car pulled out in front of her. The question we need to answer is that with all the training we did, why did she revert to instinct and grab the front brake when confronted with a real emergency? My suggestions might surprise you but they have a solid grounding in sports psychology. That’s why the concept has been part of my approach to rider training since 1997.

If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

My trainee had — in theory — been trained to brake in an emergency. Unfortunately, as the crash demonstrated, she hadn’t. She’d simply been trained to use a hard braking technique. What she hadn’t been trained to cope with was an emergency where hard braking was her ‘get out of trouble’ card. And this is the problem — learning technical skills is only one part of the problem. We have to understand how the brain responds to a threat, and right now, that’s barely covered in rider training at any level.

There’s a simple answer. She had the skill and knowledge to perform a perfectly good emergency stop in a situation she knew and expected, but when the car pulled out it was a novel situation. There was no ‘ritual’ automatic response that involved controlled use of the brakes. The amygdala — sometimes called the brain’s “survival centre” and historically referred to as the “reptilian brain” — detected a threat and took over. It reverted to the most basic collision‑avoidance strategy and triggered the panic grab of the brakes.

In riding terms, a ‘ritual’ is simply a learned motor sequence — like changing gear — that the brain can run automatically without conscious thought when it recognises the right cue. Once learned, the amygdala can trigger these responses instantly when it recognises the right cue — for gear changing, it would be the sound of the engine revving. With just a bit of experience, we don’t need to glance at the rev counter. Quite simply, emergency stop training only teaches the amygdala half the job. It learns how to brake hard, but not when to do it. The ‘cue’ is missing.

So we have to ensure the amygdala learns the essential ‘cue’.

Experience is one possible teacher. After locking the brakes and maybe falling off a few times, we learn to appreciate the risk of personal harm. We learn that staying on the bike hurts less than sliding beside it. Although it isn’t practice in the sense that we consciously know what we were doing, it is still learning by experience. We “burn” an alternative pathway to the instinctive reaction of grabbing the brakes. Even if we’re surprised by the next car that pulls out, the amygdala now has a better ritual pathway than its basic fight‑or‑flight wiring and follows that pathway to make a controlled stop.

Thus we defeat the “brake as hard as possible” instinct by learning to moderate our braking. Been there, done that. It’s still unconscious and unplanned, but it’s no longer instinctive. It shows we do learn by experience and this alternative pathway is what enables us to beat Code’s Survival Reactions that are triggered by the half-trained amygdala.

Let’s think about my test candidate again. The cue for her emergency stop in front of the examiner was the visual “hand up” signal. We’d trained her amygdala to run through the correct ritual response: shut throttle, gently apply the front, gently apply the rear, progressively squeeze the front, clutch in, foot down.

But when the real emergency developed, the cue was missing. We hadn’t taught her to link the emergency stop ritual to the trigger of an emerging car. When the car threatened her space, she was taken by surprise. Her amygdala wasn’t programmed to use the emergency stop ritual in this event, so it fell back on its primitive job — instinctive avoidance of harm via fight‑or‑flight — and she grabbed the front brake.

OK, you’ve probably spotted the problem. How do we train ourselves to deal with emergencies without experiencing them — which implies we have to survive the emergency? As I said, after a few front‑wheel lock‑ups, I personally learned not to grab the brakes as the in-built primitive pathways get overwritten my new learned behaviour. But learning by crashing really isn’t an ideal way to learn. It’s painful, expensive and occasionally termina.

Sports psychology shows the way forward. Sportspeople often have to compete in situations they can’t practise in. Tennis players and golfers spend their lives playing in front of a few dozen people, so appearing at Wimbledon or the Open triggers stress and fear of failure. Their performance collapses — a phenomenon known as choking. Their carefully learned techniques go out the window. So they use visualisation to overcome the problem.

At its most basic, visualisation means sitting back and mentally running through the steps needed to deal with the anticipated situation. The brain can be fooled into believing this is “real” experience and burns new pathways that avoid choking and instinctive reactions. The more vivid the visualisation, the more effective the training.

And that’s how we can learn to deal with situations we’ve not yet experienced and can’t practise realistically. We can use the same technique as golfers and tennis players imagining the winning shot to fool our amygdala into thinking “I’ve been here before and I know what to do” when a car really does pull out. That’s how we avoid survival reactions taking over.

And here’s something else — why wait until the car is pulling out? Why not teach ourselves to react to the tell‑tale signs of a junction — road signs, breaks in hedgerows, white paint at the roadside? Why not get into the habit of covering the brakes and horn when we first see the car? This way, rather than waiting for the car beginning to move, we use the sight of the car as the cue that trigger a proactive response.

The more tasks we routinely leave to the amygdala, the more attention we have left for everything else. Just as a competent rider isn’t consciously changing gear, a really good rider lets the amygdala hunt for hazards too.

If visualisation techniques had been combined with real emergency stop training, my trainee would have had a far better chance of reacting appropriately to the first real emergency she faced. Visualisation would have allowed her mind to connect the practical skills she’d learned through repetition with the real‑world trigger.

Unfortunately, visualisation is still missing from rider training at all levels.

 

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01. Rider Competence: Who’s Truly Ready for the Road?

I’ve been directly involved in rider training for just over three decades as I write. Even before that, I was writing about riding technique, based on what I’d personally learned via the usual mix of theory from books like ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’, and how I had interpreted what I’d read in those books via my own experience as a motorcycle courier, a job I enjoyed for sixteen years. And I was doing a bit of informal coaching with a university bike club too. It was that role that pushed me towards getting some formal qualifications. This article explores the question of rider competence and how to judge it.

As I write this short note, the UK government is holding consultations on reforming rider training. Whether anything will happen, who knows? If it does, I’ll update this particular article.

Rider Competence: Who’s Truly Ready for the Road?

Back in 1995, I was just starting out on my journey to become a qualified rider coach by starting at the bottom – as a CBT instructor. Along with three other novice instructors, I took a very intensive and thorough training course with CSM – at that time the biggest rider training school in the country. The course was very hard work, and as I was to discover over the next couple of years, an excellent foundation for working with riders at all levels – I learned more about teaching in six days than I had in six months on a post-grad education course.

But at the end I still didn’t have an answer to a crucial question:

“How do you know if a trainee rider is at an adequate standard to issue a CBT certificate?”

Rider Competence and CBT

So I asked our trainer. Here was his answer:

“Is he or she likely to kill themselves as soon as they ride out of the training school gate? If yes, then they’re not at the CBT standard. If no, then give them the certificate.”

That was pretty brutal but it answered the question. If the rider could cope out on the road, being aware of the most likely hazards and having the necessary skills to change speed and direction to negotiate those threats, then that was good enough. Scary, really. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate rider competence.

And that brings me to a question that anyone involved in coaching riders, whether directly via a training course, or even when writing articles online:

“Rider competence – what is it, what level should it be set at, and who qualifies as competent?”

Rider Competence – who qualifies?

Here’s my answer.

Competency is about being to move beyond rigid context-free rules. My favourite example of a rigid routine that is often followed without thinking about WHY we’re applying it is the basic routine taught to all new drivers (*) in the UK:

‘Mirror – Signal – Manoeuvre’.

Condensed to MSM to help us remember, it’s all too often followed by “oops!”

It’s taught to new riders too – just substitute ‘Observation’ for Mirror and you have the OSM routine.

Using mirrors and indicators competently requires us to understand the limitations of mirrors and why a blind spot check may be needed, how our signals will be interpreted by other road uses and why it’s still necessary to double-check all the way through the manoeuvre to ensure that it’s still going the way we planned it.

This is one measure of competence – being able to assign importance to particular activities and events, and thus being able to prioritise our responses to situations by analysing what matters most, rather than following a routine we learned by rote.

CBT routes are carefully chosen to take the new riders around a range of hazards, but at the end of the two hour road ride, the trainees have only learned ‘by rote’ routines for a very limited number of traffic situations. And of course, the instructor is there all the time at the end of the radio link, ready to stop in with help and advice at any moment.

Learning by rote doesn’t allow for thinking application, and learner riders straight out of CBT may not even remember the OSM routine at the end of the long day. So, if you ask me, a rider straight out of CBT definitely isn’t about to demonstrate rider competence – far from it. CBT really doesn’t equip a new rider to cope with the roads. It offers the barest selection of survival tools. And that’s why the DVSA always intended CBT to be the lead-in to training for the full motorcycle test.

But what about riders who’ve passed that full bike test?

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Rider Competence and the DVSA bike test

One thing I’ve heard many times is that trainees carry their trainer’s voice in their heads, sometimes for years after taking the UK motorcycle test, but out their on the road in front of the examiner, there’s a crucial difference when compared with CBT.

Candidates have to make their own decisions.

They don’t have the comfort zone of their instructor and the radio link to keep them out of trouble, though the examiner will step in when there’s clear danger, though of course that’s an instant test fail.

And since on test a candidate can end up anywhere, those riders cannot apply fixed rules – they have to be able to use their knowledge to solve problems. They may need to negotiate an unfamiliar roundabout or junction by using reason and analogy, thus applying what they already know to a novel situation.

This ability to move beyond rules and and rote learning, and to apply what’s already known flexibly to new challenges is the first of our measures of competence.

This is exactly why practice must be structured — something I explore in my piece on the Salami Principle and why practice makes permanent.

So by this measure, I’d say that a rider who passes the bike test – or at least, passes it without racking up a dozen minor faults – qualifies as competent. Since riders who manage a test pass must have managed to ride the test route without putting themselves at risk, I’d say most riders with a full licence are by these measures competent. Not necessarily ‘proficient’,  note, and definitely not ‘expert’. But most are competent enough to deal with the the majority of the challenges they will encounter on the roads in the next year or two…

…with one major proviso. The DVSA test creates rider competence within the context of the riding environment they are tested in. And given the limitation of the the basic DVSA motorcycle test, that’s urban riding with a bit of country road and dual carriageway thrown in. The test simply isn’t in-depth enough to cover much ground physically – the candidate is on the bike for not much more than half-an-hour. Thirty minutes doesn’t allow for much riding outside town centres so basic training rarely covers cornering or single carriageway overtaking, for the simple reason neither are likely to be severely tested on the DVSA test.

In reality, both of which are actually pretty essential skills. Nor do most learners get to tackle heavy city-centre congestion or mountain roads. And none ever ride on motorways. So by these measures, whilst a newly-qualified rider should be capable of coping with standard town traffic, they would not likely be competent in all areas.

I’ve written elsewhere about how cognitive load and fatigue limit learning — see my article on how far is too far for a training day.

What about riders who’ve taken post-test training, maybe gaining an advanced riding qualification along the way?

Rider Competence and post-test training

Well, even with their gong, some riders continue to dodge big cities. Others still avoid motorways. Many actively stay away from narrow country roads. Many a time I’ve been told “I don’t enjoy riding in those conditions so I avoid them”. We may not enjoy all riding environments, but when there are places we actively avoid, then we can’t claim to be fully competent either, regardless of having demonstrated an ‘advanced’ level of riding skills on test.

There’s also a mental element to rider competence which I believe is very much ignored at both basic and post-test level, And that’s the acceptance of responsibility for our choices.

And that starts with understand that we actually MADE choices and that we weren’t forced into a course of action by unavoidable circumstances. A driver didn’t pull out on us “from nowhere” – the car came from somewhere. The bend didn’t “tighten up on us” – we didn’t read it correctly. Most dangerously of all, if an overtake goes wrong, it wasn’t “the driver’s fault for not checking his mirrors”, it was our responsibility not to put ourselves into the position where we could end up in difficulties. In short, if we’re still blaming other road users when we end up in a potentially-dangerous situation, then we’re not demonstrating competence either.

So here’s what I do when I’m training; I apply a cascade of questions:

1. did we arrive in one piece at the end of the journey? If we didn’t then we’re obviously not competent. If we did, we can move to the next question…

2. did we force other road users to change speed or direction to avoid us? If we did, then it’s the actions of others keeping us safe on the road, not our own riding behaviour – we’re still not competent.

3. did we scare ourselves and have to take serious evasive action along the way? If we did, then clearly there was an element of luck involved in keeping us out of trouble, and we’re not competent yet. If we got there with no frights, then the next question…

4. did we arrive by gliding around other road users without impacting their choices, did we arrive without any sudden scares or evasive manoeuvres on our part? If we did, then it’s likely we are competent enough.

If you want to check your own riding for competence, you can try answering  these questions based on your own riding. But naturally, those answers lead to another series of questions. What are the skills and knowledge that are absolutely NECESSARY for a rider to know and to be able to perform to reach competency? What SHOULD a rider know? And what’s just NICE – the superficial gloss which looks good but doesn’t actually add any particular value to our riding? Next time, I’ll try to answer that.

Final point. We are unlikely to be competent at every area of riding. But the more areas we can tick off, the safer we’re likely to be out on the roads.