Pick a sport. Any sport. It doesn’t matter if it’s surfing or mountain biking: Your body is going to go where you look. At Adventure Bike School, we started out riding a cone course very slowly, weaving in and out of them. Eventually, instructors moved the cones even closer together, which starts to get very challenging on a heavier ADV bike. But one crucial tip was to see the cone you were trying to ride around, then look up. If you focused on the cone, you’d pretty much be guaranteed to squish it. If you looked at where you wanted to ride to, beyond the cone, you almost couldn’t help but line up the bike correctly.
Mind you, emulating this in real life, on a route you’ve never plied, with uneven surfaces that are wet, dry, slick, loose, and who knows what else is undeniably harder. But looking at where you want to go, never directly down, helps a ton.
Steer With Your Toes and Squeeze With Your Knees
Imagine turning on skis without paying any attention to your feet. It might work, but certainly it’s not going to be very fluid. Riding a motorcycle, especially off-road, requires using the weight you have, which is usually less than the weight of the bike, to your advantage. One way to do this is to manipulate all points of contact and enhance them, so your body is in a more athletic position. Your nose, knees, and toes should be in rough alignment, which is the “ready” position of almost any sport, with your knees bent and, in this case, squeezing inward against the gas tank. Your elbows should be up, which forces your wrists to roll forward, where you have more control of the handlebar (and also, if you roll over a rock or stump, you want your wrists up, not behind the bar, to protect them).