Sunday, March 22, 2009

One Hand Steering Fu

I love to read, and collect books in a rather compulsive manner; especially those related to my passions. Motorcycling is no exception to this. I plan on posting details of my complete motorcycling library at some point, but for now I wanted to share an absolutely excellent piece of advice I recently read.

In the book Total Control: High Performance Street Riding Techniques, Lee Parks says: "It is my ardent belief that when cornering, you should use only your inside arm to steer. This includes pushing and pulling when appropriate. I recommend this because it's extremely difficult for both arms to put reverse inputs into opposite ends of the bars in precise unison while simultaneously allowing enough 'give' in the steering for gyroscopic precession to do its thing."

I began testing this on my own a few days ago. What I have found is that by consciously focusing on using the inside arm and relaxing the outside arm, I was able to steer much quicker and tighter than usual. I realized that I had unconsciously been working against myself -- applying opposing pressure with my outside arm as some sort of steadying force. In truth, I was having my arms fight against each other, making steering harder than it needed to be.

Experiment for yourself and see if One Hand Steering Fu can help your technique.

No comments:

Post a Comment