Better riding; practice (lots) makes perfect (kinda)

By Steve Rose and Motorbike Coach Mark McVeigh, BikeSocial’s riding Coach.

I’ve spent a lot of the last seven months watching my 16-month-old granddaughter learning to walk. It’s been fascinating to see the transition between rolling over, sitting up, shuffling, standing while holding-on, tottering around and lurching into a stumble and fall. The ‘arms-out, Frankenstein shuffle’ was getting close to a walk and now, finally, something resembling a proper stroll.

She’s probably spent around five hours a day for 200+ days just to reach that point and all with a motley set of brain connections still not capable of putting two words together (unless you count ‘Uh-Oh’).

And the point of this on a motorcycle blog? She’s taken around 1000 hours of focused practice, assistance and training to get to that point and the only reward is a hug or a biscuit. A typical new motorcyclist, fresh from a direct access course is lucky if they’ve had 20 hours of training and no independent practice to go from never ridden a motorcycle to CBT, Mod 1/2 test and then out on their own on a complex missile that out-accelerates every vehicle they’ve ever driven before while being far more complex to guide around a corner. Good luck fella.

Imagine if we took the same approach to training an airline pilot?

‘Yes, Mr Rose, come this way. You’ll do CBT today, where we show you the controls and let you wobble around in a Cessna. Then a couple of morning’s training on basic manoeuvres for your first test going round cones on a runway. And then another couple of half-day’s actual flying before we check your skills on a 50-minute sortie with chief examiner Biggles following behind in another plane or possibly a hot-air balloon.’ After that, you’re on your own. Good luck.

My granddaughter practiced for 50 times longer as many riders spend learning to ride a bike to turn carpet shuffling into crossing a small room. In a year’s time she’ll have reached about 3000 hours and will be walking like a pro, including stairs without falling over.

She won’t be able to run too well or ride a bicycle, but…hey, she’s only had 150 times more practice than our imaginary rider on their new 200bhp super naked. She might even be ready to tackle running.

The point being (and thank you for sticking with me for 382 words to get here) that, while riding a motorcycle is relatively easy, riding one well on 21st century potholed roads in 21st century traffic is flipping difficult. The training we get to pass our test is the absolute minimum and anyone who suggests that the motorcycle licencing and testing regime should be made simpler needs their head examined.

The reality is that what the examiner means when they sign your certificate is that you are legally competent to ride home on your own without getting hurt.

What they forget to tell you (I’m making an assumption here because it’s 41 years since I took my test and back then we were even less well prepared) is that this is just the start. You are at the motorcycle-equivalent of the Frankenstein shuffle in that you can make it from one side of the room to the other without falling over but are still about 3000 hours from your first egg-and-spoon race.

The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert was put forward by a Canadian Professor, Anders Ericsson in a research paper in 1993. There are some who dispute it because Ericsson’s definition of expert sets a very high bar. In roadgoing motorcycling terms an ‘expert’ might be a highly experienced Police motorcycle instructor who does a bit of trials riding in his time off. Our ‘expert’ has exceptional bike control, the ability to read a road, understand the hazards and get from here to there at all speeds in all weathers in all kinds of traffic, while also solving complex problems to ensure today’s particular ‘job’ gets done. He can also teach others how to do it.

You might also suggest John McGuinness or Peter Hickman clearly have high-speed risk assessment, decision-making and machine control skills that even our police rider could only dream of. Although they don’t have the distraction of a thousand dawdling commuters to navigate around on the run-in from Ginger Hall to Ramsey.

Great riders are made, not born. The best road riders on the planet put in the effort and the hours.

If you rode a motorcycle seven days a week for three hours each day, you’d hit 10,000 hours in ten years. So, for someone like me who rides for a living and might have averaged maybe 10 hours a week for the last 30 years, I’m at 15,600 hours since I started working with bikes and maybe another 5000 hours in the 11 years before that.

So, how come the Steve Rose trophy room is empty and I still have at least two-or three close shaves every year? Because riding isn’t the same as practicing and practice only makes perfect if you actively practice the right things.

And that’s where it gets interesting for me because there are some things about riding that, if you’ll allow me a little chest-puffing I’m not too bad at. My sixth sense of reading traffic, spotting hazards and negotiating a busy road, city centre or other urban environment is developed enough that I get from one side of town (or even the country) to the other without being consciously aware of the hazards I’m predicting, and avoiding in plenty of time.

I’ve developed that sense by actively practicing and because I ride most days in busy traffic where the margin for error is small, meaning passive riding isn’t an option.

At the other end of the expert scale, my machine control is pretty poor for someone with close-on a million miles under his wheels because, aside from a few years in the 90s when I had to look heroic for magazine photos, I’ve never really practiced machine control beyond a certain point.

Every now and then I get excited about it, spend some time on my steering or slow speed manoeuvring or braking and am pleased with my progress. But there’s no immediate incentive to get better…because I’ve survived this far…, which is why I still ride most B-roads and think, ‘I could have ridden that smoother/quicker/smarter.’

How many of you are the same?

So, I guess the next question is ‘If I want to improve, how do I change the habits of (literally) a lifetime and what are the benefits?’

Last one first. The benefits are to enjoy every single ride even more and be more in-control, more confident and more able to get more from my ride. That’s a lot of additional ‘mores’.

If changing habits were easy, we’d all be thinner, healthier and better at sex. But it can be done and, for inspiration we need to look to our natural allies in geeky, passionate, unfathomable-to-normal-people hobbies… Golfers.

Golfers spend their whole existence wanting to be better at golf (and sex...probably). They devour all the information out there, read magazine articles, pay strange men in Tory trousers to help their ‘swing’ (whatever that is) and then repeat the process over and over again just so they can get the ball through the pirate ship and between the sails of the windmill more effectively.

If motorcyclists had half the desire of golfers to improve our game, we’d all be world champions. And thankfully, there is plenty of help and assistance out there to give us the leg-up we need.

There’s no substitute for great training with an inspiring coach, but that takes planning and isn’t cheap, meaning most of us can only afford one or maybe two sessions a year at most.

Teaching yourself to be better is easier than you think in between those more formal sessions. Pick a small element of your riding you want to improve, have a look on YouTube and find a few channels covering the topic. Take the good bits from each of the channels and think about how to practice those techniques on your regular rides.

The secret is to build up your skills gradually and understand that each element of riding is made up of many smaller skills.

Let’s take cornering as an example. I asked Motorbike Coach Mark McVeigh, BikeSocial’s riding Coach for his suggestions how to build up cornering confidence in easy achievable steps. He said:

“Motorcycle training is a lifelong commitment that goes well beyond the 20 hours required to pass a licensing test. I’ve integrated principles of FLOW and MICROLEARNING into my school’s modern riding system, making every one of those hours more effective.

“FLOW is an optimal state, where the difficulty of the task just exceeds a rider’s current skill level. Essentially, it's about balancing existing skill with challenge. If the task is too easy, the rider gets bored. If it’s too difficult, they feel anxious, and the risk increases significantly. Flow exists in that sweet spot where the rider is challenged enough to push their limits but not overwhelmed by the task. The magic number is training at 5% above your skill level.

“So how do you know what five per cent looks like? That’s why we started developing the motoDNA system that measures rider data because if you know you are applying 0.5g, you can then also see when you get to 0.55. It’s hard to improve what you can’t measure.

“The other part of the answer to this question is Microlearning; breaking down training into small, focused sessions that allow riders to master one aspect of riding at a time.

This approach keeps training engaging, avoids overwhelming the rider, and helps them maintain flow by gradually increasing the challenge.

“As a simple example, if you are practising an emergency stop and can stop in 100 metres, there are three things you can do to improve that by five per cent. Firstly, you can cover the brake as you might do if you were riding through town where you might expect a car to pull out in front. Covering the brake might save half a second of your total stop time – a lot more than five per cent on its own at urban speeds.

“Next you can practice the first application of brakes to transfer weight smoothly to the front tyre. That allows you to brake harder in the second phase without locking the wheel.

“Finally, with the front tyre gripping hard you increase your main braking effort by five per-cent. Each of those techniques will make a significant difference and, as you practice them more, it becomes second nature – you’re becoming an expert.

The same logic applies to all aspects of riding—throttle, brake, steering, body position, vision, scanning, situational awareness and so on.

“motoDNA has data-driven systems to support riders under development, and we also offer video review sessions where your on-board footage is assessed by a coach.

“Road craft drills are trickier to improve without assessment from a good coach, but drills like vision—looking 5% further ahead to the vanishing point or peripheral exercises like guessing car colours without looking directly—are good practices.

“So, ultimately, it’s not one thing that helps your cornering because, like Steve’s example of his granddaughter walking, there’s a whole load of connections that need to be made that put a rider in the right place on the road at the correct speed, looking at the right thing in the distance, operating the controls in a learned, considered manner. It’s a fusion of techniques delivered at the appropriate rate with a feedback loop that’s measured objectively that matters.”

Want to go deeper into your riding? 

Check out Motorbike Coach Mark McVeigh, BikeSocial’s riding Coach.

If you’d like to chat about this article or anything else biking related, join us and thousands of other riders at the Bennetts BikeSocial Facebook page.