New Motorcycle Rider Tips: Set Incremental Goals

Riding a motorcycle well is a skill that requires mind, body, and machine to work together in near seamless harmony. And it’s not something you’re going to be able to do proficiently overnight. In fact, the best riders out there know there’s always something else to learn, so they continually work to improve their competence on the bike.

Related: MC Commute

The gulf between beginner and expert can seem vast and discouraging at times when you’re first starting out. But if you take a practical approach to improving your skills, using incremental goals to build in steps and mark your accomplishments, you’ll learn to love the process, you’ll be a safer rider, and you’ll likely have a lot more fun on the bike.

The fact is whenever you set out to learn anything new or to improve your abilities, focusing too much on the finish line can make all the steps required to get there feel like a slog.

If you play sports, you already know what this is all about. You’re not going to win the championship without practicing your free throws or swinging a bat in the cages. Incremental goals are the short-term, close-range achievements you set to mark a gradual improvement in skill.

Take weight lifting, for example. You aren’t going to waltz into the gym and bench 300 pounds if you’re an untrained, 150-pound string bean just because you really, really want to do it. Your body will be incapable of pushing that kind of weight without proper training. You’d need to start at a much lighter weight, progressively overload your muscles over time, and work up to your goal. But in the meantime, by focusing on successfully getting a set number of reps at a weight a little heavier than you did the week before, you’ll enjoy multiple milestones of success, which in turn will help to keep you motivated and moving forward.

Keeping motivation high is a big reason to set incremental goals. You’ll still have the end point in mind, but will avoid becoming discouraged at the time it might take to get there.

It’s even more helpful with a task as complicated as riding a motorcycle. There are so many areas in which a motorcyclist can improve that taking things in smaller, bite-sized portions will dramatically reduce the frustration and disappointment you might feel in not taking corners like Márquez during your first week on the bike.

Setting a riding goal is a personal matter, requiring you to be honest about your abilities and the areas that need work. If you’re brand new to riding, think about some of the exercises that gave you the most trouble in your MSF course as a starting point, for example.

The way you frame your goals is also important. They could be as simple as performing 10 tricky maneuvers every week. Or drafting a pre-ride checklist then sticking to it before every ride for a month. It could be total seat time per week or a single ride goal, like keep your head up through every turn.

Becoming a proficient rider is all about making these movements and practices fluid in the moment on the bike. So you might need to break down some riding elements into parts, then work on each of those parts consciously until you’re capable enough to form one seamless motion.

Maybe left turns feel a little unnatural to you. Maybe it’s because your body position isn’t ideal, or you’re not looking through the turn, or you’re not timing your breaking and lean-in properly. These are all areas you can refine as you get miles under your belt. And a day’s riding goal could be to plan a route with 20 left turns.

Another thing to keep in mind, especially as you start out, is that riding a motorcycle requires a lot of input from your body. You’re developing motor skills and muscle memory in your early days riding, so sometimes the goal of just practicing something over and over is enough to advance your skill to the next level.

It might seem like a bit of self-help-style overkill, but keeping some sort of written record of your accomplishments is helpful.

You are certainly welcome to editorialize about how it felt to finally get your clutch in, gear shift, clutch out timing just right. But it would be just as good to put down on a piece of paper or computer document what your goal was and whether or not you accomplished it.

You’ll be able to refer back to this record and see how far you’ve come, which is great for those days when it seems like progress is slow. It’s also useful to identify areas that you may have overlooked. Again, because riding a motorcycle is a fairly complex activity, it will be easy to forget that three months ago you spent a week practicing emergency stops.

It will also give you some idea of how long it’s been since you focused on a particular aspect of riding. If it’s been three months since you practiced emergency stops, maybe it’s time to go out for an afternoon and do a few drills again.

Riding schools and courses are a fantastic way to make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. And if you have some goals set before you start looking for a course, you’ll end up getting a lot more out of the experience.

The truth is, you can make a lot of headway as a rider on your own, but getting on a closed course with instructors providing feedback on your performance is invaluable. On a track, for example, traffic concerns and road hazards are greatly reduced. This frees up your mind to stay locked in to the zone a bit more, making it possible to really nail your corner entry or body positioning. And if you have an instructor trail you for a few laps, you’ll have valuable feedback and insight into what you’re actually doing out there, what to work on to improve, and how best to do it.

This is another area where you’ll want to be honest with yourself, as it could make a big impact on which school or course will be the most helpful. A trackday on a road course is one of the most fun things to do in the world, but if you’re losing sleep at night worrying about what to do if you break traction in a corner, a flat track school might be a more effective experience to advance your riding.

All of this talk about the minutiae of riding might make it seem like there’s no room for more lofty goals. But that’s simply not the case. Always keep those larger goals in mind because they provide a framework for why all this small stuff matters.

I’ve always held that any practice like this is to just become a better rider, so there’s no definite end point for me. Riding is always practice, always a chance to work on something that will make me more capable and safe. I think that’s a smart mindset to have throughout your riding career, but that doesn’t mean more tangible goals can’t be set.

Plan a road trip with some riding friends in six months or a year, and work to be ready for whatever you might encounter on such a ride. Or pick a road that gives you trouble and dedicate yourself to riding it smoothly start to finish by a certain date. You can definitely set bigger goals for yourself like this to mark along the way.