Free modifications you can do to your adventure motorcycle to set it up for off-road riding PLUS easy beginner tips for how to ride a heavy motorcycle in any terrain.

A few years ago, in the middle of my trip around Australia I met Tim from BikeYou in Darwin. Previous to the day I spent with him, I knew nothing about off-roading - even though I had days earlier ridden some of the harshest terrain (the ruts and washouts!) across the top of Australia.

We recorded what he taught me and I hope it helps you too!

If you're new to adventure motorcycling, or you're a new Royal Enfield Himalayan owner, this video will be helpful for you. It will give you an idea of the first things to do when setting your bike up to be able to comfortably and confidently ride dirt, gravel, water and sand.

In line with our philosophy at OpenRoads, you don't need to be an expert or have heaps of cash to get out on the tracks — these tips are FREE to do!


Timecodes
0:00 - Intro
0:20 - Handle Bars
1:00 - Gear Lever
1:40 - Rear Brake
2:45 - Foot position
4:15 - Riding tips
5:50 - Cornering in dirt
8:27 - Water crossings

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🔴 ABOUT ME
If you’ve never met me before, or know of OpenRoads, my name is Jessica Zahra, I’m a sponsored motorcycle adventure rider and founder of OpenRoads — a platform (and community) specialised in motorcycle adventure experiences, from tours to rentals to events (OpenRoads Rally), and films and content too – like this video!

🔴 ABOUT THE CHANNEL
This channel (OpenRoads TV) is dedicated to producing high quality content about adventure motorcycling. If you're looking to get into off-road riding or take a trip on a motorcycle at home or overseas - join our community on here and on Facebook   / openr..  .

💡 TOPICS IN THIS VIDEO 💡
• motorcycle, beginner, how to, offroad, dirt bike, enduro, adventure bike, adventure, motorbike, biker

🔎 HASHTAGS 🔎
#motorcycle, #beginner, #howto, #offroad, #dirtbike, #enduro, #adventure bike, #adventure, #motorbike, #biker, #rearbrake, #bike, #brakelever, #foot, #clutch, #handlebars, #control, #gearlever

Transcript

Hi, I'm Jess from open roads and I'm here with Tim from by BikeYou. And today Tim is going to be showing us how to set up like up for off road riding and some general tips.

We're going to just talk a little bit about setup on the Himalayan.

So the Himalayan, it's a fantastic little bike, nice low seat, nice low foot pegs gives you lots of control. But the handlebars a quite tall, which makes it really natural to stand, you've got the set nice and tall, which is quite good, it means it helps us to lift our elbows when we're off road. So again, if you're shorter and you're sitting down, then we'd have them closer to us. But if we're standing and we're doing primarily adventure riding, then we'd have roll bars for just like you have and it helps us to lift our elbows just a little bit.

Those brake and clutch leavers as well you've got them in a lovely position, which is reasonably horizontal might be just a little bit below horizontal. And that makes them easy to access when we're sitting down. But it also makes them easy to access when we're standing. If we set the gear lever up, right, it really helps us with our competence when I have to worry about changing gears and all that sort of stuff.

You'll notice when you're standing, your foot is really flat. If we put our foot there we go put our foot back in the foot home position, what we want to do is set the lever up so that you can just pivot your foot around the lever and click up and click down that one set quite low. I reckon this gear lever is set for sitting down.

So if you sit down again, so your toe drops, and it's much more natural to use the gear lever from a sitting position for this one. So if you're going to be standing for long periods of time, I would set it for standing up.

Now we can adjust the foot peg, but what we can adjust is the is the brake lever, we use our rear brake mainly for controlling the bike and steadying the bike rather than stopping. Often find that rear brake lever is set to high. This one's a little bit on the high side, if you'd like to stand up for us, what we want is so that we can be just pivot our foot and just grab that brake lever with our toe and just modulate it really well. Could you move your foot out of the way and I'll show the camera, that little screw there just at the bottom of this pivot, that sets the brake lever where it will sit. But we also need to adjust this bolt is not here. And that will adjust where the rear brake begins to actuate. If we don't have that Slack, then the rear brake system will overheat. What that does is it locks the rear brake stops moving...