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Riding skills: How not to crash part 3

Part 3 – Think yourself a better biker

Bikers are sometimes the victims of crazy or careless car drivers no doubt.

But don’t kid yourself – most bike prangs are things we could avoid if we mastered our brains, our brakes, and the bends.

Follow our series of guides on how not to crash, and start adding the years of accident-free biking to your riding life…

In this instalment we look at ways the body can be trained to make you a better rider, even when you’re off the bike.

At home

Prove it to yourself
If you’re dubious about the value of sitting at home ‘practising’ riding by doing other things than actually riding, try this simple demo.

Take two pieces of paper, one of any size and one as big as you can find (or better still a whiteboard). Sign your signature, normal size, on the smaller piece of paper.

Now pin your larger sheet up, and sign your signature on that, making it as big as possible. Then compare your signatures.

Despite the fact you’ve probably never signed your name vertically in foot-high letters before, and you used a totally different set of muscles to before in order to do it, your signatures are almost identical.

Why? Because when the brain learns a skill, it can orchestrate whatever responses it needs to replicate it anywhere.

At work

Measure your responses without a stopwatch
Get a friend to hold a 30cm ruler vertically, with the bottom an inch above your fingers, which should be poised to catch it, between thumb and forefinger. Next ask them to drop it whenever they feel like it.

As soon as you see the ruler drop, close your fingers and stop it. Keep your fingers on it and read off the centimetre marking above your top finger. Do it three times and average the result. That’s a good measure of your response time.

An average response is 13cm, 10cm good, and anything under 10cm very good. Now do it ten times more. How much does your result improve? Still think there’s no room to improve your responses on the road?

On the road

Drive like a rider
If you cover more miles in a car than on a bike you could be building mental programs which will kick in – to disastrous effect – when you’re on your bike in an emergency.

Programs like the stiff-arm response to sudden hazards. If a cat jumps into the road ahead do you brace yourself against the wheel and dig your fingers into the rubber?

The same applies to cornering – are you relying on a car’s extra ability to brake mid-corner or change line to get you round, rather than reading the road properly and braking and accelerating at the right points for a bike?

Practise driving with a biking mindset and you can boost riding behaviour rather than degrading it.