Tips for Safety for Motorcycle Riders #8

Active safety: Practice swerving

Either swerve or brake
To brake is not the adequate strategy in every situation. Sometimes it is better to swerve around the obstacle.
It's important to do one thing at a time: either brake or swerve. If you have to do both, first brake to loose speed, let go of the brakes, and then swerve.
Most advanced rider courses make you practise on this.

Countersteering
You swerve by far the most quickly and efficiently by countersteering.
That means, very simply:

- When you want to swerve to the right, push against your right handlebar.

- When you want to swerve to the left, push against your left handlebar.

Practise
Practise this, especially when you are not familiar with that way of initiating a turn.

It's also very important that you know, from experience, how far you can lean your motorcycle into a turn. That you know exactly how far you can go in a given situation.
Like in the case of braking, there are not only accidents that could have been prevented by braking harder or by leaning more, but also accidents that are caused by braking too hard or leaning too far.

To get a feeling for your motorcycle in curves, a vacation in the mountains is an ideal training, as is, of course, an advanced riding course on a circuit.

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