VISION – JOINING THE DOTS

Look where you want to go!   Steer the bike with your eyes!    You go where you look!

How often have we motorcyclists heard these phrases? Looking where you want to go obviously relates to vision, an important sense for everyday life, however when we introduce motorcycles, the importance of vision increases dramatically, not just as an essential tool for high performance riding and racing but also for survival on the road.

The fact is most of us are damaging our vision, namely our peripheral vision with our modern lifestyle of sitting in front of TV and computer screens. Compared to our ancestors, our visual field has narrowed dramatically.

If we get into the habit of looking directly at objects while restricting the awareness of our surrounding field of view, it’s comparable to not fully using other areas of our body. For example if we routinely only bend our knee ten degrees, you could imagine this bad habit of restricted movement would ultimately lead to poor function, soreness and long term damage.

It’s safe to assume that our vision also follows the familiar “use it or lose it” rule that is evident in other areas of our body.In other words, if we only use one part of our visual field, the rest of our visual circuitry will begin to go inactive.

So how important is peripheral vision to our riding and what can we do to increase our visual performance?

Peripheral vision is the part of vision that occurs outside the main focus of gaze or the means to know what’s happening around you without turning your head. The loss of peripheral vision is commonly referred to as ‘tunnel vision’. The role of peripheral vision is to spot the predators that lurk around us, originally tigers and nowadays more like cars and trucks or other riders and hazards that can do us harm. On the track, peripheral vision is a mega important skill essential to cutting fast laps, on the road its essential for survival.

Peripheral awareness is also linked to balance, movement, reaction speed, reduced mental fatigue and believe it or not intelligence. Its powerful stuff and improving our vision and, with training, our riding is there for the taking.

More Skill = More Fun

Information from the peripheral retina goes directly to the centre of the brain rather than to the brains visual centres. This means that your reaction speed is increased by using your peripheral vision. Boxers and martial artists know this. They don’t look directly at their opponent’s fists or feet, and can react quicker as a result.

Good peripheral vision increases optimum awareness of your overall visual environment. The more aware we are of our surroundings the easier it is to move around. As a motorcycle trainer, I see limited peripheral vision linked to a load of riding errors on motoDNAs advanced motorcycle training courses like target fixation, getting lost in turns, inconsistency, running wide, disorientation, mental fatigue, etc

Most riders also don’t look far enough ahead; however you can also look too far ahead; getting lost in the turn, hence peripheral vision is only part of the equation. You also need to understand how to apply it to your riding.

Fortunately, we can improve our peripheral vision by practising certain exercises, however, how many of us actually practise or exercise appropriate vision techniques to develop this much overlooked skill?

Next time you are riding down the highway, use your peripheral vision or your minds eye to look at the vehicles around you whilst keeping your eyes looking ahead. You will be surprised by what you are able to see with your minds eye, different colours, and different types of vehicles and also look out for an important benefit – a slower sense of speed. If you are on the track, you may want to use more advanced vision enhancement techniques such as light reaction training to improve reaction times and enhance peripheral fields of vision.

Vision, is a dynamic process that involves combining skills of aiming, tracking and focusing, along with a bunch of other mental and neurological processes. So how does peripheral vision help us on the track or road?

To figure this out, let’s consider the elements needed to negotiate a corner, elements known as reference points (RP), these guide us and are vital to help prevent getting lost in the corner. Typical reference points include, braking point, turn in point, apex point and exit point.

The trick is to look ahead, but not too far, and lock in these reference points with your eyes then use your peripheral vision to judge distance and track your motorcycle between those points. On the road you will be scanning too, looking for potholes, oil spills, gravel, etc

The mechanics of cornering on a track go something like this:

You approach the corner with throttle on, your vision is scanning for your braking reference point (RP), and you locate the braking RP and lock this in peripherally. Next your vision is scanning for your turn in RP. You locate your turn in RP and lock this in visually too. Meanwhile you are still on full throttle and have not actually reached your braking RP yet, however you are already aware of your braking and turn in RPs in your peripheral vision. You reach your braking RP, located with your peripheral vision and brake, meanwhile your vision is further ahead, scanning for your apex RP which you locate and lock in peripherally. Meanwhile you haven’t turned in yet. You get the picture. Effectively you are joining the dots.

As mentioned previously, using peripheral vision also slows down the sense of speed. If your average speed for the corner is 150 Km/h, that’s over 40 metres in just one second. In an 80 metre long corner all this would be over in 2 seconds, hence the value of slowing down the sense of speed!

Practise Makes Perfect

There’s so many ‘experts’ online these days, so its super important to learn the correct techniques and then do lots of practise.

Make a plan, get training and improve your riding.

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