The Intermediate Trap: Why Year Three Riders Are Most at Risk

So let's get started with probably one of the most foundational aspects of how you begin to ride on a motorcycle and how you sort of address yourself to the bike.

And this has to do with your body position.

And unfortunately sometimes what we see is that there are some habits that you form with how you sit on the bike that continue on as you become more of an intermediate.

And you're still new enough that you don't really realize these mistakes.

Unfortunately, many of these are also holding back your riding.

So the first one I want to talk about is a death grip on the handlebars.

Now you are a little bit more comfortable with riding, yet you still cling onto the handlebars like you're going to fly off the back of the bike.

squeezing the handlebars too tightly actually transfers road bumps directly into your arms.

And this can make the bike feel very nervous and almost like unresponsive because you aren't necessarily controlling it.

It's just, you're so rigid on the bike.

You're not allowing the bike to kind of naturally kind of handle any of the undulations in the road where having a looser grip on the handlebars would do so.

So having a looser grip onto the handlebars is really when you start to become a little bit more fluid and smoother in your riding.

And the big thing is that while you have the foundations as an intermediate rider, you aren't necessarily the smoothest rider quite yet.

And so removing that death grip is gonna be one of the best things that you can do.

And so really think about it the next time that you get on the bike, how are you actually holding the handlebars, what are you doing? And do you have this like really tight grip with your hands wrapped around those handle grips as tightly as you possibly can? Loosen those up a little bit, just relax your wrists, calm down a bit.

Another problem that we see oftentimes is locked elbows.

And you'll see this very often if you have like ape hanger, handlebars, because this force is more of a stretch, but it can happen with any sort of handlebars.

You're just reached all the way out.

Your elbows are perfectly straight.

There is no bend whatsoever in them, which means you have no forgiveness.

You have nothing that is going to handle and allow you to move very quickly.

You've got this just rigid pole running from your shoulder to your wrist instead of having something that has a little bit of movement in it by having that slight bend in your elbows.

And so you're tensing your upper body, and this helps to restrict the motorcycle's natural self-steering.

Remember, if you actually let go of the handlebars of the motorcycle, the bike will generally try to self-steer and going along on its own nice and smoothly.

It doesn't necessarily need you to be holding it upright.