Learning to ride a motorcycle requires a learning curve. There are some things that seem right when you are just starting out but experienced riders will tell you otherwise and some riders never break bad habits or poor riding practices. Because they don’t continue to learn and develop they are stuck with that new rider skills set for their entire riding lifespan.
One of the most common mistakes I hear about riding a motorcycle is, “It is too hot to ride with gear on…I am riding in jeans and a t-shirt in order to stay cooler.”
Have you ever paid attention to guys who work installing roofs for a living, or even footage of Bedouin people who live in one of the hottest places on earth?
Look at these guys, they are covered from head to toe. There is a good reason why they are covered and as riders, we could learn something from these guys.
So, our natural reaction to heat is to take more clothing off. On a motorcycle that is bad because you are removing your protective layer to do so…so, in the event of a crash you are much less protected.
But it is also counterproductive to what you are trying to do.
Aside from keeping you protected in a crash having the proper riding gear offers you the following advantages.
- It allows you to sweat.
- Sweat is your body’s own defense mechanism to heat. It works especially well when riding on a motorcycle because your motion on the motorcycle allows the sweat your body produces to work at maximum effectiveness.
- It keeps the sweat on you longer
- By riding with a jacket on it allows the sweat to stay on your body longer giving it more time to cool the body with evaporative cooling.
- It protects the skin from direct sunlight
- The sun evaporates the sweat and heats up the surface of the skin. So keeping your self covered allows the body to travel in its own shaded protection.
By riding in shorts and a t-shirt you are making it impossible for the body to maintain sweat long enough to do its job. The body responds by causing you to sweat more and you dehydrate sooner.
So having your gear on not only protects you in a crash but it keeps you cooler on a motorcycle when you are moving because it allows the perspiration to do its job. Now, if you are just standing around on a parking lot the gear will heat you up quickly but moving down the road, keep your gear on.
Another common piece of advice I hear from experienced riders to new riders is. Don’t get a small motorcycle, you will be bored with it in a few weeks and looking for a bigger motorcycle.
Buying the wrong motorcycle is a huge hindrance to learning to ride a motorcycle.
What do I mean by that?
Here is a true story of a rider I have met.
He was a new rider, so he will be purchasing his first motorcycle, loves Harleys, wants to tour on a motorcycle, and money is not an obstacle in getting the motorcycle he wants.
Because of the type of riding he wants to do and from the advice of his friends he goes out and buys this.
Wow, beautiful motorcycle! Expensive too.
He does the smart thing and takes a new rider course. He spends the weekend riding on a closed parking lot, with no threat of traffic, in and out of cones on a 200cc Yamaha TW200 motorcycle with absolutely no threat of oncoming traffic.
He struggles at first in the new rider class but he passes the course, not with a perfect score, but he was getting better by the end of the weekend.
He leaves with the certificate to get the M endorsement on his license and he comes home to this.
Our friend decides it will just take some time to get used to the Harley so he will take it easy. His wife was not real sure about him getting into motorcycles so the last thing he wants to do is drop it and cause her to worry more about him crashing, plus he paid a lot of money for it so he doesn’t want to drop it either.
The first time I saw him riding this…you could see the fear in his eyes. Every stop sign was a panic stop in the hopes that he does not drop his dream motorcycle.
Practice? He was not going to take this to a parking lot and practice doing u-turns. He could barely do them on the TW200 in the training class.
Emergency braking? Nope, not yet.
Tight turns from a stop? Not on this motorcycle.
So all he does is ride from point a to point b and hopes he does not crash anywhere in between. His fear and lack of continued training greatly hinder his growth as a rider.
By the time he gets comfortable riding his dream motorcycle in a straight line he has totally forgotten 95% of anything taught in the new rider class so he never develops those skills on the new motorcycle.
I feel pretty confident in saying if this same rider had purchased a reasonable first motorcycle he would have grown so much faster as a new rider, he would not have been intimidated to train and today he would be 10X the rider he turned out to be…only if he would have purchased the right motorcycle to start out with.
If you buy a used, small motorcycle for the first year of riding you will grow as a rider 10X faster. You can then sell that used motorcycle for almost what you paid for it and then step up to a larger motorcycle.
So, three common bad habits or misbeliefs in the riding community.
- Removing gear because of the heat
- Buying the wrong motorcycle to start with and
- Lack of or misunderstanding of basic slow speed riding skills.
