You're Doing it Wrong: Parking, Mounting & Dismounting (Bike Basics Ep.1)

one of the most common mistakes i see other motorcyclists making is that they're spending a ton of extra energy and effort to get on and off their motorcycles they're also parking their motorcycles in ways that make it difficult for them they end up having to push their bike around or reposition it and they're using all the strength and energy that would be better spent on actual riding [Music] so whether you're a dirt rider an adventure rider a street rider whatever it might be all of us are facing situations with uneven terrain hills that go up and down side to side soft ground uh heavy motorcycles tall motorcycles some riders are shorter and have a really hard time getting off and on a lot of us drop our bikes by accident because they roll off the side stand or we're pushing them around or we're trying to get off them and it's uneven so what i'm going to teach you today is how to spend less energy getting on and off the motorcycle spend less energy pushing it around unnecessarily i'm going to show you how to deal with uneven and soft terrain difficult hills difficult parking situations and i'm going to show you hopefully how to reduce the amount of times that you drop your bike so with that being said let's get started so a few things before we get started number one rule never ever ever park your motorcycle in neutral the reason being that if you park your bike in neutral what's going to happen is that your bike is going to want to roll and if you put the side stand down and there's any little motion on your bike it's going to roll off the side stand and want to fall over so when you come to a stop use the kill switch the key whatever you want to do pop the clutch out i don't care make sure the motorcycle is in first gear and then also roll it forward again so it's holding against the gear and only then should you put it on a side stand a couple of other ground rules before we start in on the tutorial if you ever find yourself muscling the bike around and really working up a sweat something is wrong you're doing something wrong so stop and re-evaluate what's happening another tip i have is that get one of those enlarging feet for your side stand it makes a huge difference it allows the side stand to have more support and if you park in soft terrain it won't sink in the third thing is that when you're practicing these kinds of things don't be like me right now wear all the gear all the time you know wear riding gear when you're doing this because even if you're practicing in your driveway there's a chance you could fall over and get hurt so please do that so let's talk about parking so one of the first things to know about parking is that before you stop your motorcycle you should be looking ahead and planning look at the terrain look at the parking spot what obstacles do you have to deal with is the ground out of level front to back side to side is there a curb you can use that might either be in your way or you could use to your advantage are there other motorcycles that are going to block you or the other vehicles if it's a parking spot between cars maybe you should consider if you can trying to back in your bike so that you won't have to you know try to get it out in reverse if you're parking off-road look for areas of dirt that don't have big depressions and don't have super soft soil look for raised areas on the side of the road where the road graters have worked and you know use that to your advantage for getting off and on so the lesson is always be looking ahead and planning you know what is a good parking spot don't just randomly pull in somewhere and expect that the motorcycle is going to be in a perfect parking situation because it won't let's talk about dealing with hills so the first thing to know about dealing with hills is that it's always always going to be preferable to park either uphill with the bike pointing uphill or the bike pointing even downhill as opposed to going across the hill sideways and i'll show you what i mean in a second so if you're going to park your bike on an uphill slope pointing up again remember you have to park your motorcycle in gear otherwise it can roll any direction and if the stow and if the slope is really steep your bike can even drag its side stand and go downhill ask me how i know that so what if you need to park your motorcycle like in this situation where it's pointing downhill so again make sure when you stop the bike when you're still on it that you kill the bike when it's in gear and that you let the bike roll forward holding against the gear set so it can't roll anymore only then should you put your side stand down and get off the motorcycle other than that there's not much to know once the bike is in gear you see it's holding against the gear it's not going to roll off the side stand now if you have a bike with a dct maybe a gold wing or an africa twin they have a parking brake use your parking brake all right so now what if you simply cannot avoid parking in a situation where the hill is going to one side or the other so in this situation my hill is down sloping away to my left or to my side with the kickstand so this situation is challenging because when i put the bike on a side stand it's going to be leaned very very far over and depending on how steep it is the bike can actually lean too far and fall over so let me show you how i deal with this if the slope is not too bad you can still park normally but be careful with getting off and on because the bike is going to lean a lot now right here you kind of have to evaluate is there too much lean and can the side stand deal with this before you go any further and if you're a short rider this is one of the situations where you end up tipping over now i have now i've decided that this is still acceptable i can still park here like this get off the motorcycle now we'll show you how to get off and on in a minute because that's not how you do it okay so now we're on the same hill but we have the opposite problem the ground to the left of me where my kickstand is is sloping up so what's going to happen is i try to put my kickstand down but the bike's not leaning enough for me to really safely get off so there's a couple ways to deal with this first of all if it's just way too steep then this is not a parking situation you can deal with you're going to have to reposition the bike and like i said try to get a pointing uphill that's the easiest way but if you can't do that then there's a couple options that you have one if you're in the dirt or soft soil you can use your foot to kind of give a little or kick yourself a little depression in the dirt and put your side stand in that but if that's not an option what you have to do is try to push the bike over as far as you can to try to get it leaned as much as possible and then dismount using whatever technique you want to use but i'm going to teach you that in a second just keep your bike very very far to the left in terms of your weight and so this bike still has enough lean where it's not tipping over all right so now let's talk about how we get on and off our motorcycle with the least amount of drama the least amount of energy so the way that most of you are doing this that a lot of people have learned is what i call the hard way or the awkward way so you've got a tall motorcycle you've got luggage all these things in your way and what you're trying to do is you're not using the foot peg you're leaving your foot on the ground and then you're trying to slide you're putting your leg way up in the air just getting your leg over your luggage over your top case whatever it is swinging over and then trying to settle into the bike and then also trying to find footing with your right foot which if it's a tall bike you can't even reach the ground so this is the hard way of doing it and you're not going to do this anymore after watching this video so what i'm about to teach you sometimes i call maybe the cowboy mount or the horse mount essentially what we're going to do is use the foot pace and the side stand of the bike to our advantage and save energy and save drama and not you know get caught up in our seat in our luggage so let me show you the basics of doing this one caution about this method is that if you don't have a strong kickstand you could potentially break your kickstand by doing this that's only really going to be a factor on some dirt bikes out there ktms are notorious for this i've snapped kickstands on ktms doing this so but for most street bikes and adventure bikes your kickstand is more than strong enough to handle what i'm about to show you okay so here's how we're gonna do this we're gonna approach our motorcycle right and instead of keeping our left foot on the ground what you're gonna do well first of all make sure if you watch the parking segment a minute ago you know that the motorcycle is in gear it cannot roll forward because it's held up against the gear kickstand is down what i like to do is have the bars pretty much straight i find that to be the easiest not cocked one way or the other one thing i always do is i grab the front brake because it's just extra insurance that the bike is not going to move when you're getting on an offset so you grab the front brake you put your left foot here onto the left foot peg and then keeping your weight kind of centered over the center axis of the motorcycle you simply swing your right leg up and over out of the way of your top box and your seat and you get on the bike now look you can sit on the bike now it's supported by the kickstand you can get on right away and go about your day this method of mounting works on any kind of motorcycle and works also in most parking situations whether the bike is uphill downhill or even at a slight angle although i'll show you how to deal with the angle in a second grab the front brake left foot on the peg swing the right leg over and you're on so you might occasionally have a situation where there's something blocking your path on the left side of the bike and you may want to mount from the right side this is not what you normally would do but you still can do it so let me show you how so again motorcycle always in gear i'll never forget that grab the front brake just like before but the difference is now you're using your right foot because it goes on the right foot peg and the difference with this method because the tendency is if you put a lot of weight on the right peg the bike is going to want to start to come off the side stand well the way to avoid that is to get your weight closer into the center of the bike here to the left and you can even lean your torso over more so you see how i'm hugging the bike i've got my right foot here and i get my left leg up and over and we get on it's fine it works basically the same way just keep your weight again to the center of the bike or more to the left so that the bike isn't going to tip over to your right by putting too much fulcrum on that right foot bag so again we approach the bike grab the front brake get our weight nice and close to the center of the bike even have our left leg touching then swing your left leg up and over and get on so you can mount from either side this way now what about cowboy mounting if the bike is on a side hill like we talked about earlier so again if the bike's pointing uphill or downhill doesn't really change anything except it makes it more important to use your front brake and make sure the bike's in gear if the bike is leaning at either not leaning enough or leaning too much there's a couple things to keep in mind if the bike is almost upright this is a situation where you do not want to try to mount from the right side because the second i put weight on this right foot peg the bike is coming up off the side stand so that's kind of a no-go so let's come around to the left side so if i want to do this kind of mount from the left side with the bike parked uphill to the left what i tried to do is test it out first okay i've got my front brake bikes and gear and what i'm doing in this situation is i'm trying to prevent the bike from tipping over to the right so what i'm going to do when i mount instead of pushing my weight over the other way i'm going to keep my weight to the left so i'm going to put on my weight here carefully swing my leg over and as i do this keep my weight to the left of the center of the bike and see how it's perfectly fine so if you're not careful and you put too much weight to the other side what's going to happen is oops the bike's going to want to go over to the right so again look at the physics of the situation the bike is not leaning very much so you need to keep your weight as far to this side as possible don't worry your foot peg's not going to break keep your weight left and then even as you mount i'm still keeping my weight left so i can get my side stand up and then ride on okay so let's talk about we've parked our bike we've got it in gear let's say we get the kickstand down now how do you want to get off your motorcycle so what i see most people doing is they put their left foot on the ground that's the first mistake they make because what's happening then is that your body is too low and your right foot has to then drag over all this nice luggage and over your back seat and it's just a big struggle so instead what we're going to do is we're basically going to reverse the cowboy mount so instead of putting our foot on the ground what we're going to do is taking all the precautions that we've already talked about before and all the notes about parking and slopes and putting it in gear we're going to grab our front brake always hold on to that just provides really good stability you're going to stand up on the motorcycle you can be slightly stand up you can stand all the way up it doesn't really matter but you're going to stand up this is going to allow your leg to clear the motorcycle you're going to keep your left foot on the peg and you're simply going to raise your right foot right leg over the bike just like the reverse of mounting your right foot is going to hit the ground first and then your left foot hits the ground and you let go of the bike no energy no drama no problems so there may be situations when you want to exit the bike to the right maybe something's blocking you on the left maybe there's a mud puddle who knows what it is you can still dismount to the right it's just the opposite but again keep in mind what i taught you about the mounting and the parking you want to keep the balance of the bike on the kickstand so that the bike's not going to fall over to the right so in order to do that what you do grab the front brake stand up just like before and what you're going to do is you're going to try to maintain your body position somewhat in the center so that the bike doesn't want to tip over to the right so what you do is you lift your left leg off the peg and you swing it over and just like when we're mounting you want to keep your weight close to the bike you don't want to swing your way out way over here because then look the bike wants to stand up it's just basic physics so again swing your leg over keep your weight towards the motorcycle and keep your left leg really close right down by the exhaust don't burn yourself and then get off you can easily do that but again if you start to if you shift your weight too much it's going to rock the bike off the side stand and you're potentially going to drop your 20 000 press bike that kawasaki lent you what about in the dirt so in the dirt everything i just taught you still basically applies and is still the same there's a couple things a couple additional cautions that you have to take one is that you know dirt is soft and your bike is going to tend to sink more into the dirt especially if you don't have one of those side stand enlargers which means your bike's going to lean more also if you park like on a gopher hole or in sand your side stand is simply going to just dig into the ground and your bike's going to start going over so keep in mind the tips i taught you earlier about finding a more suitable place to park other things you can do in the dirt is that sometimes if it's really really uneven ground and it's really rocky i will look for loose rocks that i could potentially use to put under my kickstand to shim it so what i might do sometimes is you know park the bike if i can get off i'll get off get that rock and put it underneath so the bike is not leaned over so far if it's really really bad you got to be careful with this one but get off the bike without putting the stand down and then you know try to grab a rock from nearby shove it under here so you have enough support under your side stand to then park ah this bike weighs 600 pounds i can't push it up this hill i know this doesn't look like a hill but it actually is look how much muscle i have to try to give it to move this bike but you need to stop doing that so here are some tips for moving your motorcycle around without using too much energy so after all this is a motor cycle it has a motor in it so let's use the motor to do the work for us so if i want to move this bike around the garage the driveway i want to load it up into a trailer or or a pickup truck bed i never push it i don't have time for that i don't have the energy i work with bikes all day it's what i do for a living now so i don't have the energy to do that so what i do is learn how to balance your bike learn where the center balance point is don't you know be pushing it around leaned over like this it's too heavy it's too heavy but even a thousand pound motorcycle will feel very light if it's balanced so to move the bike around here's what i'm going to do i'm going to put the kickstand up i'm going to pull the clutch in hold the front brake so it's not rolling back fire up the engine and then i'm going to use the engine to move the bike around i'm going to feather the clutch you see how i'm feathering the clutch i can roll backwards use the brake to stop roll forwards use the clutch to move it i don't push my bikes you see how i'm hardly i'm not even using throttle i'm just slowly feathering the clutch uh with the bike idling to move it forwards and if i want to move backwards if it's on a slope i simply back it down use the brake what if your bike's pointed downhill and you need to reverse well your motorcycle doesn't have a reverse so what i usually do will drive the bike around so it's just not pointing downhill otherwise you know you have no choice but to tug against it so i try to avoid that you need to understand the balance of your motorcycle right it wants to balance at rest and when riding too because of centrifugal forces and all that but other videos have shown this but you should if you're confident be able to walk around your motorcycle holding on to points like this right kick stands up this will help you understand the balance point of your bike right see no kickstand you should be able to walk around your whole motorcycle without dropping it right with the kickstand up again you're not using muscles to do this so i just walked around it without the kickstand down again understand the balance and practice now if you're going to practice this you know do it in some dirt or sand or put some towels down in case you do drop your bike so we're almost done but a quick note about center stands or you might call them main stance center stands are great for leveling your bike out to load luggage and just to park your bike but the problem with center stands is that they don't work very well in uneven ground because it'll be too much side to side it doesn't allow the bike to lean center stands work the best when you're parked on a level surface or pointing slightly uphill like i am here if i'm pointing downhill the problem with a center stand pointing downhill is that your rear tire is going to be off the ground so you're not going to have the braking effect of being in gear so unless you have a way to lock your front brake the bike is potentially going to roll forward off the center stand but if the bike's level or pointing slightly uphill it's very easy to do so a lot of people really are challenged by using the center stand but it's pretty basic to put it on the center stand you're going to grab the handlebar here your left hand again understand your balance have it balanced you can have this up or down feel for the tangs of the center stand to contact the ground evenly you're going to use your body weight to step pretend you're trying to bury this into the ground don't use your back to try to like lift the bike up so you're going to put all your weight down onto the center stand and the bike will pop up on the center stand so as i practice my balance here i sincerely hope this video was useful and informative for you parking your bike getting off and on not wasting energy not tipping over not having to pick up your bike and just generally looking more like a pro again practice makes perfect and you don't learn the stuff overnight roam wasn't built in a day and all that so practice go out there do it and you'll learn from experience so if you find my content useful please consider becoming a patreon please subscribe to the channel and hit the bell please also give the video a thumbs up please leave a comment it really helps out the algorithm until next time see you on the trail you

Channel: Big Rock Moto

Views: 435,944

Rating: 4.8513155 out of 5

Keywords: how to ride a motorcycle, how to get on a motorcycle, how to park a motorcycle, tips for short riders, moving a heavy motorcycle

Id: qruOW51NNdQ

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021