How To Ride A Motorcycle In 15 Minutes.

All right, what's up YouTube? In today's video, what we're gonna be talking about is how to ride a motorcycle. This will be helpful for anybody that's never ridden a motorcycle before. If you're thinking about getting your first bike, you're a little concerned about what it's like to ride a bike, we're gonna go through that. Or maybe you're that guy or gal that just said, I got a good deal on this motorcycle, I'm gonna buy it, you bought it, you don't know how to ride it, and you're afraid of getting on and doing the wrong thing. Or maybe you're just, like I said, that you're thinking about getting a bike, and you just wanna know what does riding look like? How do I do this thing? Is it for me? Well, in today's video, it should cover that. What I will ask is that if this video is helpful to you, please like, please drop me a comment. Let me know if there was something that I missed or something that you wished I would have covered that I didn't. We'll make sure to take care of that in another video. And then if you like this content that I've been putting out and what I'm gonna put out in the future, I just ask that you subscribe. I would love to have subscribers tell me what they wanna see so that we can build this channel together and grow this channel together. All right, so let's get started. So first, we're gonna start with what we call the cockpit of the bike. We're gonna work our way from the left side to the right side. After we go into the cockpit, I'm gonna go onto the left side of the bike towards the middle, and the right side of the bike towards the middle, and we'll talk about what we got going on there. So first, right here, this is not a brake. I thought it was a brake, but it isn't. It is your clutch. Your clutch is what allows you to transfer power from the engine to the rear wheel of the bike, all right? This is your clutch. Right here, on this side, you have what they call a passing indicator. Basically, you click this. What it's gonna do, it's gonna make the lights on the bike flash a little bit brighter. You can use that to let people know that you're gonna pass. Although, one good point they brought up in the safety courses, sometimes this can be confusing. If you're clicking this to indicate that you're gonna pass as the motorcyclist, sometimes the cars can misread that and think you're telling them to pass. Nevertheless, regardless of how you use it, this is what that button does. All right, coming right here, this is our low beam. This is our high beam. This switch right here with the triangles, this is our going left, going right. This is our signal indicators, okay? So you move that to the left. The left signal indicator will come on. If you push this in, it'll cancel the signal indicator. Most bikes, well, at least this bike that I have, if you turn left, it's not like a car. So if you put this in left, if you move this left and you turn left and then you immediately turn the bike back straight, your signal light will still be on. So you gotta push this in the middle to cancel the signal light. Now, moving down here, this is our horn button. This lets our little baby horn that people can't hear. You push this and your little baby horn goes off and no one knows you're there, but it's there, right? You got a horn. Moving towards the middle of the cockpit, what we have is our ignition. Some bikes have it, this one does. So obviously you have off, you have on. And then if you move your handlebars all the way to the left, if you turn your ignition all the way to the left here, it'll lock the bike so that now the motorcycle can't, the handlebars and the front wheel can't move left and right, they're locked in place. That's supposed to be an anti-theft device. How good is it? I don't really know, and I hope to never find out. This is a quad lock. It's a quad lock motorcycle mount. Lets me mount my cell phone here, vibration dampener, et cetera. If you guys wanna see a video on how to install it, let me know, I'll do that. I'll probably do a video about that, showing you how to install it, how to put the motorcycle vibration dampener on there so you don't screw up your camera, we'll go over that. But that's not a part of the bike stock, it's just a little black thing right there. So, you know, like I said, if you've never ridden a motorcycle before, or you're wondering what that is, or you're extremely new to this, that's not stock right there. Now, this right here, this is our engine kill switch. When the switch is in this mode with this little circle with the X on it, even if the ignition is on and you push this button here, the engine's not gonna run. This is also a safety mechanism. You know, if something crazy happens while you're on the bike, you just shift it to here and it'll kill the engine. This is actually how we start the bike, right here. This little button right there, that actually starts the bike, and I'll show you in a second after we mount how we start the bike. This right here is our front brake. Two notable things about the front brake is if you barely squeeze the front brake without actually engaging the brake pads, I don't know if you can hear this little click here, that'll flash your rear brake lights. Usually, it's a good habit to kind of tap this a little bit if you're at the stoplight, if there's no cars behind you, just kind of clicking that like that. If someone's on their cell phone and not paying attention, it could help you from being rear-ended. This is the throttle. You roll this back and it is your throttle. It's what allows the bike to move forward, gives the bike more power. Down here, we have, wait, sorry, second notable thing, I said two notable things, so that was the first notable thing about the front brake. The second notable thing is, keep in mind if you've never ridden before, 70% of your stopping power comes from the front brake. The front brake does have the most power. When you do brake, you don't want to grab what we call grabbing a handful of brake. You want to slowly, gradually squeeze on that. Now, coming down here to the left side of the bike right here, what we have is our shifting. This is how we shift the gears, okay? When the bike is in neutral, this is usually how most bikes work. Whatever bike you bought, you know, I would say just play with it in a parking lot or if you have access to the manual, just make sure that it works this way, but for the most part, most motorcycles are gonna work the way I'm gonna explain it here. When the bike is in neutral, if you push down one time, that will take you into first. That's one click down. If you push up one click, that'll take you into second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth to get into neutral, it's a half a click down from second or if you're in first gear to get in neutral, it's a half a click up, okay? With this bike and some motorcycles do have it and I do love this feature about the Ninja 400, this bike has something called a positive neutral finder. So if the bike is at a standstill and you click and you're in first gear and you click it up, even if it's a full click, it'll automatically find neutral for you. I love that feature. Now, moving over here to the right side of the bike, what we have is the rear brake. This button here or not button, but this lever here is our rear brake. 30% of our stopping power comes from the rear brake. Even though we got 30% back here and 70% up here, remember we're gonna wanna squeeze both of those brakes at the same time, it's gonna increase our stability. When we're braking, it's gonna help us stop faster with more power and in a more smooth manner. All right. All right, so now that we talked about the different sides of the bike, the levers, the gears, et cetera, the gear shifters, what we're gonna do now is talk about how to properly mount the bike. So first thing is, if your handlebar is straight, it's usually easier. So you just wanna turn the handlebar left. What that's gonna do is make the bike lean over towards you more. Plus, when we get on, what you'll see is we're gonna turn those handlebars straight. If you have a heavier bike, by turning those handlebars straight, it's gonna allow the bike to stand up on its own. So that's a win. So first thing we're gonna wanna do, we're gonna grip the left handlebar right here. We're gonna take our right hand. We're gonna reach over, squeeze the front brake, kick our leg over, straighten out the handlebars. Now we're mounting. Okay, we mounted. All right, so now that we've properly mounted the bike, let's talk about starting the bike. Starting the bike's pretty simple. First thing, we're gonna take our left hand. We're gonna grab this clutch. We're gonna squeeze it. Second, we're gonna take our hand here. We'll turn our ignition key. We'll let our dashboard come on. We wanna look for the bike to be in neutral. If you don't have a gear indicator switch that shows first, second, third, neutral, et cetera, just look for a little green N or some type of N that's lit up on your dash. That'll let you know you're in neutral. Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna turn our engine kill switch from killing the engine to not killing the engine. Once again, we're gonna move this from the little circle with the X in it to the circle with no X in it. Once that's done, we're gonna push our starter button right down here and the bike's gonna start. Once we've started the bike, we're gonna slowly, and I mean very slowly, release that clutch. Even though the bike is in neutral and we know it's in neutral, the reason we're gonna slowly release the clutch is we wanna get in a habit of good clutch control. We don't wanna be doing this. You get in the habit of doing that, you get killed out there. So remember, it's not practice that makes perfect, it's perfect practice that makes perfect. Using our left leg, we push down and get the bike in the first gear. Notice that the neutral light is going. If this is your first time riding, you'll notice that the bike, when you put it in first gear, will make a clunking noise and it will jump forward like this. That's normal. The bike's not broken. Unless you bought it used from someone shady on Craigslist, then I can't help you. But now that we're in first gear, all we're gonna do, even though our hand is on the throttle, we're not giving it gas. We are not doing this. This bike will jump from underneath you. First gear is usually gonna have your most torque. So all we wanna do to get the bike rolling and underway is slowly release the clutch. And I want you to listen for that friction zone. I'm gonna hit the friction zone three times. And when we're hitting that friction zone, we're gonna just keep slowly releasing and the bike's gonna move on its own. But I want you to listen for that friction zone. Listen, see if you can hear it. All right, one more time. And friction. You hear that? It's like a whining noise. One more time. That's normal. That's our friction zone. When we're there, we wanna slowly release. So we're gonna hit the friction zone and release and the bike will start moving on its own, just like this. Now, notice this hand is free. I'm not giving the bike any gas. If you wanna come to a parking lot like I'm at, you can come to a parking lot, practice getting the bike in the friction zone. Or if you're at your house in a neighborhood where there's not a lot of busy traffic, practice getting the bike in the friction zone. That'll help. So what I'm gonna do is, before I give it some throttle, I'm gonna disengage the clutch with the left hand and you'll see that the bike's gonna stop and then we'll start again with just the clutch, okay? So there, one more time. We wanna get underway. All we're gonna do is put the clutch in the friction zone and the bike will move on its own. Simple. All right, now let's give it some gas and move into stopping the bike. So just a little bit of gas. It doesn't take much to move the bike in first gear. My recommendation would be, especially if you're a newer rider, come to a parking lot and just ride around in first gear. It may look pretty simple how I'm riding at six miles an hour in first gear. It's not as easy as it looks. I used to screw it up a lot and get the bike jumping like a freaking Bronco from Texas. But come to a parking lot, practice throttle control. Give it a little bit more gas. You see? That's all in first gear. So stopping the bike, we're gonna slowly release the throttle, slowly. Because if we release it too fast, it'll jerk and I'll show you what that jerking looks like. If I'm like this, I don't know if you can see it on the camera, the bike lurches forward. It throws me, right? So we wanna get that throttle control. But stopping the bike is simple. All we do is slowly release the clutch, slowly squeeze the front and rear brake at the same time, shift up, back into neutral. To stop the bike, slowly roll off the throttle with the right hand while opening the clutch with the left hand, simultaneously braking with the front brake and the rear brake. Slow, gradual squeeze on the front and rear brake, moving the bike into neutral by shifting up. Hitting our engine kill switch here first. Now, some people will hit the ignition first. Some people hit the engine kill switch. I do the engine kill switch because that's how I was taught in the motorcycle safety course. And their argument for that is, you wanna hit the kill switch first because it gets you in the habit of killing the engine with the kill switch. That way, if there's ever an accident or something crazy happening where you need to kill the bike quickly, instead of taking your hand from here and trying to reach over, it's just a quick button, right? Turn off the ignition, steering wheel, turning the handlebars to the left, dismounting. And that's how you ride a motorcycle. Super easy, right?