Using Your Lower Body on Track: The How To’s and How it Helps

The way the sports bikes of today look and make you sit wasn’t just a fluke from generations of design changes.

The position of the pegs, seat, tank and bars have been meticulously defined to put riders in a position that will enable them to best handle the bike and use it as intended.

What you find with many inexperienced and experienced riders alike (I would guess born out of many miles road riding) is a tendency to rely on mainly one area for stabilising themselves on the bike – the bars.

The pegs, seat, grooves in side of the tank and overall shape of it have all been designed and positioned to give you multiple points of contact that you can use to anchor yourself to the bike.

With a little work from your lower body you can give yourself a stable base to work from that will allow you to ride not only quicker, but safer too.

Here are the ways in which your lower body can help you and the bike.

The Front End is For Steering and Bike Stabilisation Only!

You may not know it, but believe me when I tell you that the front end has an extremely important job of keeping the bike upright and stable. As you’ve probably seen many times, a rider can take their hands off the bars and quite happily maintain their course without fear of ever getting intimate with the tarmac, and (without getting into deeper motorcycle dynamics territory) this is largely down to the front end working as it should by design.

When you throw on a rider that rides with arms stiff as a board and hangs onto the bars for dear life mid corner, the front end isn’t happy because it can’t freely do its job of keeping the bike stable. As a result it could act unfavourably when trying to deal with the contours of the track (tank slapper anyone?).

On the flip side, with a rider that is well anchored to the bike using their lower body and core muscles, the front end is happy as Larry because it hasn’t got a sizeable weight pulling it all over the place while it tries to deal with bumps and undulations.

The only time we want to interfere with the front end is when we want to change the direction of travel, which I should add is made a great deal easier when you’re not hanging on the bars in terms of the effort it takes to steer the bike, the fine level at which you can now make minor corrections, and the extra level of feel you get to slight movements from the front end.

Benefits on the Brakes

There are also benefits to using your lower body to support yourself during your braking efforts.

When you’re hard on the brakes, if you rely solely on your arms to brace yourself it means that more unwanted weight is being transferred to the front end, but what’s more is the rider often stays in this stiff straight arm position at the turn point which will again make the act of turning the bike more difficult.

By gripping the tank with your knees to stop yourself sliding forward and using your core muscles to support your upper body, you are giving the front end an easier time but also leaving your upper body free and relaxed to accurately turn the bike at the turn point.

As a side note, have a look at Stompgrip Tank Pads for your bike. They make using the tank for stability an awful lot easier, particularly on the brakes. I personally would never do without them now.

Give Your Suspension An Easier Time

It sounds strange, but you as the rider can in fact act as part of the suspension. By taking some of the weight off the seat and weighting the pegs you are using your own legs to help absorb bumps, which will in turn give your bike and its suspension an easier time of dealing with your fleshy mass.

Flicking From One Side to the Other (Chicanes)

Another time when you can benefit from using your lower body is during quick flick chicanes.

During a chicane there will be a time when you need to move your body from one side of the bike to the other, and what a lot of riders tend to do in this situation is push their bums out of the seat to move it across to the other side.

The trouble with this is that during the time when you are moving your bum across, your only points of contact with the bike are the pegs and the bars, and while the pegs will be taking most of your weight, you will be using the bars to stabilise yourself.

What happens then is that as you’re moving your body and in turn your weight across the bike, there will more than likely be some unwanted inputs that you make on the bars that will affect the speed and accuracy at which you can steer the bike from one side to the other.

Instead you should look to unweight the seat by pushing on the pegs (not lifting your bum right out the seat) and while using your knees to hold on to the tank, almost slide across the seat into position for the second part of the chicane.

This will see far less unwanted inputs on the bars and you will also free up your arms to do the most important job of accurately counter-steering the bike and flicking it over.

This one takes some practise, but as they say, practise makes perfect.

Try it at Home!

With your bike on its centre stand or on a paddock stand, have a go at weighting the pegs and gripping the tank slightly with your knees and then taking your hands off the handle bars. If you do it slowly, you should feel your legs and lower torso (back and abdomen) coming in to support your upper body. If you struggle to do it, these are the muscles that you need to work on and build up until you can do it easily.

You can also try this while riding. While keeping your hands on the bars this time, concentrate on getting all of your upper body weight off of your hands and supported by your lower body to the point where you can freely move your arms and hands. This is the point where you really want to be throughout your riding, hands free to let the front end do its job but also free to easily and accurately turn the bike.

If this notion is pretty new to you it could well feel like it’s all a bit much, but with a little fitness work (if you need it) and a bit of practise it soon becomes second nature.

As with most things relating to body position, different riders will do things differently and it’s your job to find a position that feels right for you in terms comfort, that also lets you get the results you need i.e. a free upper body and front end.

By using your lower body more and learning how we effectively steer a motorcycle, you’ll be amazed at just how easy it is to quickly and accurately get a motorcycle to do what you want; all the while the front end is keeping everything safe and stable for you with its new found freedom.