3 Cornering Drills on a Dirt Bike - Plus Bonus Tip!!

In this video, we're gonna show you three awesome drills to improve your cornering.

What's up everyone. Tyler from the MX factory here in Austin, Texas at the MX factory. We've got three drills today. Let's get right into the first one.

First year is gonna be keeping your leg up in the corners and working on finding a point of the shroud and making sure your leg sticks there, no matter what, when you're going through the corners, the reason for this is that's probably the most common mistake that pulls you off the bike or pulls you to the ground.

Is your foot throwing your body's balance off. Okay. So if you've got that foot up off the ground, where if you're leaned over in a corner in. It's not your heel's not gonna catch the dirt and push you at any way. Then the success chances are much, much higher going through that corner. A little side note.

If you watch any pro racing, you can watch these guys constantly making the mistakes. So it's not just you, it's not just a beginner. It's not gonna intermediate. Everyone makes a mistake. You could be doing this drill for the rest of time and it wouldn't hurt your riding. So there's a couple of things in this that you've gotta be aware of.

One, if you have poor mobility in your hamstring, it's hard to be in proper upper body riding position and keep your leg up. So keep that in mind, if it's really difficult for you to get your leg up high, maybe it's time to do a little stretching on the back of the legs. And so. We can get on the front of the bike with the leg, sticking up.

You want the leg to be on the top part of the shroud pushing into it. So you wanna kind of put pressure into the bike with both legs when you're going through the corner. But mainly in this scenario, we wanna make sure that we're giving some pressure to the inside leg, to the top part of the shroud. You don't want your leg to be so straight that if it does hit the ground, that it hyper extender, like you want to have a little bend.

I call a micro bend in your. That way, if it hits the ground, it bends back this way and not the way that it's not supposed to. And what I like to do as far as quantity on this is as I like to pick a day a week where I just go to the track working this one specific thing, we all know that there's so many things going on in the motorcycle at once.

It's hard to layer things. So pick a day a week, or if you go riding four times a month, Pick one of those times and make that your leg up day, where that is your main focus that day. If you do that consistently throughout your years of riding, it's gonna tremendously improve your cornering

drill. Number two is gonna be keeping your feet on the pegs. And it sounds a little counterintuitive to do that, but what it does is starts to connect the throttle with the. Rather than letting the balance of your leg, kind of give you that security. What we're looking for is kind of rewire our brain to take the throttle as our savior, rather than our actually body saving us from falling over.

So steady throtle in the corner does a few things. One, it keeps the bike planted two. It also makes it where you're suspension is settled front to back. So you can carve the corner correctly. And three just makes for a smoother. Set speed, which usually in turn gives you more straightaway speed. When you've got your feet on the pegs, it does a couple things.

One of the things is it's controlling the bike with your core, right? So if you make the mistake and you decide to keep your feet on the pegs, rather than catching yourself with your foot, you'll notice that you move the bike in a way that. Saves that fall. Okay. And if you can train yourself to do that, that's gonna eliminate a lot of falls just outta your corner.

You're gonna turn the throttle and you're gonna move the bike in the way that creates traction and balance. Coming outta the corner.

Drill number three here, we're gonna talk about steady throttle in the, when to apply that. There's always gonna be times where you wanna get on the gas a little earlier or a little. But the rule of thumb that happens to work, 95% of the time is getting on the gas at the apex corner. So that means right in the middle of the arc of the corner.

So what we're looking to do here is turn the throttle on at the midway point of the corner and commit to that throtle coming outta the corner, no matter what that's gonna give you time to get all your breaking and deceleration done, you're set up and you're lean. And then once you're ready to get to the apex, you're also ready to turn that throttle in.

Nice and smooth. Now, one thing I will say, if you're having trouble controlling the. By committing to the throttle from the middle all the way through the exit. Maybe you're giving too much. Throtle so let's just try it first, just turning the throtle on and keeping it steady and seeing if that gets you come out of the track where you want to come out.

Got a little bonus drill for you that I think will really help when you've tied all these things together that we, that we've worked on. And you, you kinda understand those different drills, try taking at the apex, turning your head and looking through the turn a little earlier than what you normally would.

What we like to do here is we'll hold up a number midway down the straightaway, and what'll require the student to call out that number before they get out of the corner all the way their job is to look through spot the number, call the number. Four they're straight coming outta the corner. What you'll find is that once you get your eyes out, you can kind of make decisions a little quicker because you have more, uh, eyes on more land, right.

So you know what you're coming up against. So try to go midway through the turn, turn the head, look down the straightaway at the obstacle that's coming up right outta the corner. Thanks so much for watching. We have a free gift for you guys in the description below. Just click the link and sign up for an email list and, uh, we'll send it right to you.

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