Static Balance on Motorcycle

Static balance on a motorcycle - is essentially a lateral balance. So this is a key skill for riding on any two-wheeled vehicle. This experience is very important both for motorsport and for ordinary motorcycle life.

Practical use

After these exercises it will be much easier to slow ride on a road bike, for example during traffic jams or in the parking zone. This skill will help you to go strait, when you have a passenger behind you, who likes to move his body.

For enduro this experience will be very useful, when you go along the logs, borders, downhills, on narrow lines… Actually, always and everywhere.  Good balance allows you not only to beat different obstacles, but also to go easier, more relaxed, to waste less energy. For example, if previously you had to stop before the obstacle and to help your motorcycle by pushing it, now you can beat this obstacle without any touching of the ground by your feet. In the cases, when you have to stop, you will need to ride a few meters to go back to a balance. These few meters can determine your success for beating hard obstacles. For example if you have a short distance before the uphill, it can be not beaten if you stop before it.

For trials static balance is a basis, foundation. Riders there stand still very often and for a long time without touching the ground by feet.

Slow wheelie is not only a balance along the bike, but also it is a lateral balance. This means learning of a static balance will be useful for wheelies.

In motocross good feeling of the lateral balance is also useful, for example, when you go over a slippery surface, rut or narrow line.

Training

Static balance is a very affordable thing for training. You can use any motorcycle for this, in any conditions, outdoor or indoor. You can and you should learn it from easy difficulty to hard. It is showed in details in our video, how you can make your practicing easier in the beginning and how to make exercises more difficult step by step further to raise your skills. And how to get some variety in practicing.   

The balance can be reached not only by movements of the body, pushing on the foot pegs, but also by small turns of the handlebar. This happens by itself when you driving slowly. During static balance, the skill has to be trained separately, focusing on this particular method of balancing.

As soon as you are good in static balance, in moving your feet over the pegs, in removing your hands from the handlebar, in removing your feet one after another from the pegs, include dynamic into your practicing. First of all try during your static balance to turn on the first gear and go strait without losing a balance. The next step is try to go slowly and smoothly stop in to static balance. It is good to use a soft dirt hole or a rut for stopping in it of the front wheel, it will help you much.

When you learn to do all this, you will be surprised how much information you can get from the surface under the wheels. You will start to “read” the type of dirt and any bumps in it; you will start to use for support not only dirt, but also roots, logs, stones or any other objects under the wheels.

What is surprising, during such trainings, not only the lateral balance is improved, but also the smooth operation with all control levers: throttle, brakes, clutch. Because of any jerk will put you out of balance.

The correct position of the body on the motorcycle will be reached, since in order not to get tired, you need to keep the body, hands and legs in a relaxed, unstressed state. You need to make counter movements not to “hang” on your hands, that is, to move forward when start going and to move back when stopping.

Balancing with a strait handlebar

We tell in the video, you should train with a turned handlebar, as far as motorcycle is more stable in this case. So a good question goes out of this: is it possible to static balance with a strait handlebar? Somebody can say: “I saw so many times during trials competitions, how riders stand still with strait handlebar”. And he will be right. There is a secret here; a motorcycle needs some support for static balance with a strait handlebar. Even the best trials riders of the world do it when front or rear wheel pushes against an obstacle.

It’s easy to train this way: you need to go slowly in balance, stick into any obstacle (wood, stone, border, etc.) and to fixate the motorcycle it is to be clamped, i.e. the tire is slightly flattened and the fork is slightly compressed. Here you need to use both brakes to get a good fixation. Or you can, for example, during going of a large log, fixate the motorcycle by the brakes when the wheel touches the log with it's back side. It is easiest to train balance with a strait handlebar when the motorcycle pushes against an obstacle both from behind and from the front; for example, it will be easy to do in a pit slightly shorter than your motorcycle.

Motorcycle

You can train static balance on any type of a motorcycle: road bike, off-road bike, dirtbike, scooter, that does not matter. It will be easier on a motorcycles with low center of gravity and where the foot pegs are in the center of the motorcycle (like in dirtbikes). If the pegs are not comfortable for standing on them, you can train static balance while sitting.

As the summary, these exercises not only will improve you driving skills, but also they will allow you to do some stunts and to surprise people, for example, by starting your motorcycle via kick starter while you are standing on the foot pegs and to go away without losing the balance.