Body Position

[Green RT]

The fourth suggestion on the list recently posted Five Riding Skills … talks about body position. It prompted me to post a short account of my experiences with body position.

 

For many, maybe most or all readers of this forum, the following comments will not contain any new advice about riding. I am posting it because there may be someone out there for whom it is new.

 

I started riding motorcycles at the age of 13. Except for a few periods without one for various reasons I have never stopped. I am 71 and have over 500,000 miles on two wheels. I have to confess I have never taken any riding classes of any kind, safety or any other. I have thought about it, but it never rose to the top of my priority list. I have spent some time reading books about riding and practicing and applying some of the things I learned from reading. The point of this short story is to relate one bad habit that I learned from reading about riding, and how I overcame it.

 

Early in my learning about riding motorcycles, I came across discussions of counter steering and explanations about how, unlike cars, two-wheeled vehicles do not go in the direction you point the front wheel. With a strong background in physics, the explanations all made sense and obviously worked in practice. I followed suggestions that "to go right, push on the right handgrip". My riding techniques worked okay but I was never as comfortable in curves as I would have liked.

 

At some point I realized there was a fundamental flaw in the way I was riding. I am not sure what contributed to this understanding. Watching racers, reading comments in this forum, in any event, at some point I realized that by pushing on the grip in the direction I wanted to turn, I was pushing my body upright in the opposite direction. This is actually a common technique you can see in parking lot acrobatics at slow speeds. With it, you can maximize the lean and the consequent sharpness of a turn at slow speeds. However, as most already know, it is counter-productive to cornering at speed. It left me feeling like I was sitting on top of the motorcycle as it turned under me rather than being a part of it. And it was very uncomfortable if turns tightened unexpectedly in mid course.

 

With this understanding, I started to initiate turns by shifting my upper body in the direction of the turn. For awhile I would physically shift my position on the saddle as well as leaning into the turn with my upper body, imitating the movement of racers in high speed turns. Now, at the moderate speeds I ride at, I mostly find it adequate to just lean into the turn. The act of leaning pushes the motorcycle into the turn very comfortably. And, if the turn tightens in mid-stream, you can tighten the line by just leaning more heavily into the turn.

 

I know this is old hat to most, but maybe not to all.