How To Keep From Laying Down Your Bike

In this video, I want to provide some safety tips about what to do when you’re entering a blind curve. If you end up hitting your front tire with either loose gravel, sand, leaves, grass, whatever it is, a hazard on the road, but you’re hitting it on a blind curve, what can you do to keep your bike up and not lose control?

Funny enough, the rule is to avoid it in the first place.

Sure, it seems simple, but here’s what I mean by that. There are two simple rules for everyone no matter what your skill level, that can help you avoid this scenario. The two rules are speed and vision.

How Can Speed And Vision Help A Rider Avoid Laying Down Their Bike?

Speed is very important when you’re coming onto the curve, and the rule of thumb there is slow in, fast out. This refers to pace, and how you want to go at a pace coming into the curve where you are fully under control of your motorcycle, and more importantly, are able to avoid something that you see on the road.

If you’re going too fast, obviously you’re not going to have enough time to use any defensive maneuvers to avoid any objects in the roadway.

Number two dovetails into that first rule, which is you need to increase your vision as much as possible.

What the experts recommend is when you’re going into a blind curve, you want to go as wide as possible to give yourself as large of a field of vision as possible, so you can see what’s on the roadway ahead of you in your lane.

No matter what your skill level, use these tricks to try to avoid this type of incident.

Are There Any Other Skills That Can Be Used To Avoid Laying Down Your Bike?

There are some skills that are recommended for these circumstances, all of which you can learn in advanced training courses.

One of these skills is called trail breaking.

What this entails is when you’re coming into the curve, that you break all the way to the apex of the curve using your front brake.

Next, you use that front brake as you’re going in the apex. As you come to the apex of the curve, you are then swapping brake for throttle and using that initial rule of thumb which is slow in, fast out of the curve.

Now, the theory here is when you’re applying the brake, your front tire will expand. It gives your tire more tread if it does hit this gravel, to consume it and not lose control of the bike. Again, it’s one of the more advanced skills, and you want to practice this a little bit.

Another tip, which is a very controversial one that is used by police in their training overseas, and it’s obviously a rule violation of the roads here in America, but to the extent, you can do this safely.

Again, toward the second general rule, which is maximizing your field of vision going into the curve and getting as broad as you can as you’re entering the curve, they suggest using the full width of the roads.

This means that you’re going into the opposite lane of travel. So, you are as wide as possible as you’re coming into that curve the better.

Now, you need to make sure if you’re doing this, no one else is around, and you don’t want any officers around that could see you into oncoming traffic.

Police officers are trained on how to do this, so it must be effective, but you still have to be careful.

So again, I hope these will help you, give you a little bit of a quick refresher as you’re entering turns.

I know a lot of folks love going on Dragon’s Tail because of all those winding curves, so this is great advice for riding on Dragon’s Trail.