Total Motorcycle Community Forums

At the MSF they will tell you:

Push OUT on the LEFT bar to turn LEFT

Push OUT on the RIGHT bar to turn RIGHT

assuming you've got a decent amount of speed.

What happends from there on out is irrelevant, but so long as you look through the turn and keep pressure on the bar you will turn. The harder/further you push, the faster you turn.

Why it works doesn't really matter, and will be debated for eons untold, but so long as you remember those two rules posted above you will be fine.

*NOTE* that doesn't work in the parking lot, you're moving to slow, steer it like a bicycle.

Newbie51,

I hope you've learned your lesson. Don't ever, ever, ever post another question about countersteering on this forum ever again.......... it gets the residents all hot and bothered!!!

try asking if you should buy a 1000cc Gixxer as your first bike now

bok wrote:try asking if you should buy a 1000cc Gixxer as your first bike now

Of course he should start out on a Hayabusa...if you're gonna go down in flames, do it BIG

Sevulturus has it right with his last description. Pressure on the grip on the side you want to lean to. Want to lean more, increase the pressure.

I don't have any trouble flicking my bike over to initiate a turn. However, if I am going a bit wide, and still feel I have more lean angle to spare(with, which my experience isn't a whole lot right now), consciously applying more pressure to the inside grip leans me over more and tightens up my line.

This is taking some getting used to for me. I've ridden bikes in the past without any knowledge of countersteering.

I think what was going on was I WAS countersteering to initiate/stay in a turn, but I wasn't taking turns at any rate of speed. Thus there was no need to apply extra countersteering pressure in the middle of a turn because I never went wide.

Now that I'm getting a bit more spirited in my cornering, it feels weird and wrong to countersteer. I feel like the bike is going to come right out from under me. But it DOES lean the bike over more. I know it works. I DO know that trying to shift my weight or lean more does nothing to keep the bike from staying on its wide heading.

After I do it a while, I know the "weird" sensation will wear off and I will do it automatically.

Anyone who is a nay-sayer needs to read that article posted on the second or 3rd page, the ZX-6 with an extra straight non-steerable handlebar on it. Riders grabbed that thing, and no matter how much they leaned, or twisted, or kicked and screamed, the bike kept going in a straight line.

for those who want to see countersteering in play at sub 40 kmph speeds, check out the three countersteering pics i have in the TMW Flickr group. these three shots were taken at a local Motorcycle Safety course.

Countersteering 1
Countersteering 2
Countersteering 3

NEWBIE51:

You are asking good questions, and have you taken the course yet?

I'm the guy who is riding the bike in the video clip, csteer.mpg;

I can tell you (and earwig) that after riding motorcycles for 35 years, bicycles for 40 years, and teaching THOUSANDS of people how to ride motorcycles that countersteering is ***the best and most precise mechanism for steering at ALL SPEEDS***, even less than 5 mph. Bok's 3 frame sequence also clearly shows how countersteering is used to create leaning for a turn, but you can't really tell how fast the rider is going. That was why I used video.

The digression into counter weighting, as it is more correctly descibed, is a common mistake, and the technique of counter weighting is only intended to aid in turning the bike on the smallest possible radius at the lowest possible speed.

Now there's something that will quiet the nay-sayers, and I ask everyone the following: let's say you are already leaned over at ANY SPEED, and want to straighten up the bike, which way do you point your wheel, and based on your answer, isn't that same effect true at ALL TIMES no matter how much the bike is leaning, or even straight up and down?

No one gets a bike to straighten up from leaning other than by pointing the wheel into a turn, and oh my gosh, if you kept pointing the wheel the same way, it will continue past straight up into leaning to the opposite side... Oh, that's countersteering!

Due to my original hosting provider being bought out by a bunch of morons, I had to abandon my original domain. since I OWN this new domain, it is unlikely to change any time in the future. The countersteering video lives on at:

http://www.cape-vision.com/wayg/mrep/csteer.htm