BRC for Experienced Students

We get a lot of students who come to the BRC with previous experience with motorcycles. Whether it’s from teaching themselves with a permit, riding dirt bikes as a kid, riding in another country, or riding without a license, previous experience can make the weekend feel like an expensive waste of time that you’re being forced into. We do absolutely make an effort to coach experienced riders a bit differently and to make feedback more appropriate to your skill level, but when push comes to shove we are required to follow a fixed set of exercises as part of a state mandated licensing curriculum.

I do genuinely believe the BRC can be helpful even if you have thousands of miles of riding under your belt, so I made this post to list out some benefits from taking the BRC along with tips and advice for how to approach the BRC as an experienced student.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth based on traffic safety studies: riders who are taught by friends or family are over one-third more likely to crash than those who taught themselves, and riders with professional instruction are half as likely to crash as those who are self-taught. Here’s another one: the most dangerous times in the motorcycle learning curve are you first six months and months 25-36, where you are twice as likely to crash than established riders (with 4+ years of experience). With about two years of experience, riders tend to get over-confident and that leads directly taking on dangerous risk offsets and learning hard lessons.

You might have been taught by someone who truly knows how to ride, but there are a lot of “experienced” riders out there who aren’t particularly skilled. Plenty of riders with 10 years of experience haven’t progressed in those ten years, they’ve just repeated their first year of riding ten times. There are also a lot of motorcycle myths out there — have you ever heard anyone tell you to avoid using the front brake so you don’t flip over the handlebars? Or that you only turn by leaning your body?

Even if your friends and family are great, well-informed riders, they may not be great teachers or maybe they wanted to spare your feelings and be encouraging instead of giving you blunt feedback about your skills. Teaching and coaching are a skills that take practice, just like riding. At the BRC, you’ll have the benefit of totally independent, professional instruction from coaches who are only invested in making sure you ride well. Our course and curriculum are based on decades of experience in teaching riders and continuously updated to make sure that we’re providing the highest quality of instruction.

As an experience rider, you’ll know that motorcycles are self-stabilizing once they get up to speed. Modern electronic rider aids like ABS and traction control – while invaluable safety tools – can hide a lot of sins with the brakes and throttle. We see plenty of experienced riders come into the BRC and struggle even more than the novices because they’ve reinforced bad habits over time or come to over-rely on momentum and rider aids to cover their mistakes. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.

One of the main focuses of the BRC is on slow-speed control as a building block for high-speed control. We train at lower speeds because it forces riders to refine clutch and throttle control, body positioning, and smoothness. If you build those fundamentals at low speeds, they naturally extend to higher speeds. The reverse isn’t necessarily true, and we see plenty of students who drop bikes and get frustrated because they’re used to relying on momentum to maneuver and not finesse.

We teach the BRC as if everyone is totally new to riding. Try to embrace that mentality and be open to viewing the skills and muscle memory that you’ve developed over time with a fresh and critical perspective.

Additionally, there are definitely some ways that we teach technique to beginners that can (and should) be modified as they gain experience and coordination. You might already have the coordination to combine steps or do things differently, but it helps us if our more experienced students help to demonstrate these skills for the newer riders and set an example. You’ll also find some benefits to your own riding, at least in a training setting.

One of the most obvious examples of this is using all your fingers on the levers. Using both levers with 1-2 fingers is pretty common in the dirt, on the track, or for defensive riding for a variety of very good reasons. On the other hand, in situations where you’re spending a lot of time manipulating the clutch, whether it’s in stop-and-go traffic or in day of parking lot training drills, using all four fingers can help to avoid fatigue and keep you fresh longer.

Other examples of include not covering the front brake and separating braking from cornering. Again, there are techniques and strategies where both of those are very good ideas, but in a training setting for brand-new riders our main priority is building fundamental skills as safely as possible. Nervous riders tend to tighten up their bodies and squeeze their hands when they panic, and over-applying the front brake in a corner is a very real possibility in that scenario.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is brand new to riding. You might take clutch-control and shifting for granted, but coordinating all four limbs while operating a motorcycle is really hard for a lot of novices. Throughout the weekend, try to remain patient and give us time to make sure that everyone is learning the skills that they need to learn.

In a similar vein, make sure not to rush or pressure riders in our later exercises. We’ll add speed and cornering as the weekend progresses, and typically we set up these exercises in circuits with multiple riders out together. If the rider in front of you is going slower than you’d like, try dropping back for a lap and then accelerating into the space that opens up. If you ride up on a nervous rider too hard, it’ll usually end with them getting even more nervous and slowing down even more.

We really do want this to be a useful and informative training for students of all backgrounds. If you have a question that goes beyond the basic instruction that we offer in the BRC, feel free to ask it during our discussions. We may elect to answer your question in a 1:1 setting during a break or lunch to maximize riding time, but we will answer it.