The Road to Mastery: The Smart Way to Begin, Continue, or Redirect Your Riding Journey by Greg Widmar

Author:Greg Widmar [Widmar, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781086572698
Publisher: MotoJitsu, LLC
Published: 2019-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

PRACTICE

Many riders believe the key to improvement is simply riding more, getting more miles under their belt. This is a myth. Simply riding more is not the same as practicing. Practicing is focused attention to a specific skill through repetition. Most of us have heard the saying, “Practice makes perfect,” but this is incorrect. Perfect practice makes perfect. I know many riders who are really good at the wrong thing.

One of the most common questions I get from people on my YouTube channel is how to improve their riding skills, as if there’s a secret only I know about. There isn’t. If you want to improve, attend higher-level motorcycle courses and spend time practicing what you learn. The idea is to practice so much that it’s hard to make a mistake. This isn’t what riders want to hear. It seems many riders I interact with want some kind of a microwave technique, something that’s fast and easy yet yields the results they’re looking for. There are no shortcuts to becoming a skilled rider. If you don’t put in the time, you won’t get the results.

If a car pulls out in front of you, you will not have time to think about how to stop as fast as possible—you will just react. Your reaction could be many things, but unless you burned the correct technique into muscle memory through repetition, you’re unlikely to avoid the accident. To put it another way, without practicing, you are setting yourself up for failure. Just like it’s said in the movie “Man on Fire”: “There is trained and untrained. Now which are you?”

No matter your skill or experience, make time to practice at least twice a week. If there is one thing that separates me from most other riders, it is the amount of time I spend practicing the techniques I have learned in the courses I have attended. All motorcycle skills are perishable. Making time to practice will not only prepare you for the inevitable car coming into your lane or a distracted driver blowing through a stop light, but will also increase your confidence in yourself and the motorcycle’s capabilities.

While you’re practicing, accept and expect mistakes to happen. You may drop the bike during an attempted U-turn or skid the tire while stopping. Every rider goes through this period where it seems you can’t do anything right, but what you do afterwards makes all the difference. Will you give up and stop practicing or will you look at the mistake you made as a great example of what not to do again? Your choice.

I spend hours each week practicing, repetition after repetition, seeing how I can improve. I try to figure out how to make the skill I’m working on even easier, and how to be more efficient and more relaxed while doing it. Many people over the years have seen what I can do on my motorcycle and tell me they wish they could do that. I tell them to stop wishing and make it happen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.