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Why Are We Weighting The Outside Peg?


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It is not so much weighting the outside peg as it is locking in with your outside leg by applying pressure with your outside foot on the foot peg in order to lock your knee into the tank. Done correctly, there are several benefits.

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This threw me for quite a while as well. Partially I think because of the type of bike I ride on the street. By the time I started taking CSS classes I no longer had a sportbike and my BMW K1200R had rearsets that sat low (comparatively) so I wasn’t getting the feeling of "biting" into the tank when weighting the outside peg (creating a pivot point). Once I got on a bike with a more aggressive seating position it started to make sense. That and once I had a good pivot point (by weighing the outside peg and digging my knee into the tank( I got what it felt like to be locked onto the bike. I have upgraded the rearsets on the KR the week after that.

 

 

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I weight the outside peg on corner exit to try to get the bike upright faster and get on the throttle faster.

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I think I failed to provide context for my question:

 

Tw2, Chapter 19 ... criss-cross ... i get lock-on, strength, stability ... I just can't get my head around:

 

why the outside peg and not the inside one for stability and strength?

 

i did try the countersteer + outside peg today and it just felt unnerving

 

I feel like i'm on the edge of getting it, but that some new perspective might get me there for real.

 

Ago

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By using the outer leg, you get better leverage. Try standing with the right side to a wall and push with the right hand. First use your right foot to push off, and then the left foot.

 

Kai

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An instructor at a safety training (2007) told us (students) that adding weight to the outside footpeg would enhance traction of the rear wheel, I never fully understood why though so I cannot deal with any detailed physical explanation , only remember that what he said seemed to make sense at the time

 

 

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An instructor at a safety training (2007) told us (students) that adding weight to the outside footpeg would enhance traction of the rear wheel, I never fully understood why though so I cannot deal with any detailed physical explanation , only remember that what he said seemed to make sense at the time

 

 

I remember now what that instructor said to us: when you apply pressure to the inside peg you add force to the outside of the turn (simply because of the more pointed angel of the line from the peg closer to the street surface to the tire contact patch) , pressure on the outside peg results in a force to the inside of the turn thus giving more traction

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I just did level three and they cover this.

 

Here's what I understand, and see if this makes sense. Here's a drill to illustrate the action.

 

Stand facing a wall, as if under arrest. Remove your left arm from the wall. Now lift your left leg. Feel unstable? Try pushing with your right hand into the wall. How does that feel?

 

Now put your left leg down and pull up your right leg. Now push with your right hand (as your left hand and right foot should no longer be touching anything). How does that feel?

 

It also comes from concepts such as lunging in fencing, for example. Your rear leg provides the strength.

 

Now that you lock your outside leg onto the bike, it keeps the weight off your hands, and allows you to turn the bike in with less effort.

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your comments about leverage and lunging were helpful in my experiments this week.

now it actually feels really cool to weight the outside peg

-- like totally having a stabilizing platform against which to push and support my countersteering!

between that and tank grip / lock on, my riding feels totally different

-- like an integrated system instead of random body bits flying about.

once it gets up to 80 degrees i'm going to put on the snakeskin TechSpecs tankpads.

-- I'm looking forward to improving the lock onto the tank.

Ago

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ahhh... the old question of 'peg weighting... wacko.gif

 

When I first read that part in Twist I spent an age thinking about it as well. The conclusion I came to was that it had more to do with traction. I may be wrong, because I haven't been game to keep experimenting with this - but one afternoon on my way home from work I kind of 'stomped' on the inside 'peg mid-corner. It made the bike slide (maybe it helped that it was a bit of a dusty corner as well). No matter how much weight I put onto the outside 'peg I have never had a problem with losing traction. Try it yourself if you're game. I'm interested to hear other people's experience with that as well.

 

I visualise it this way - imagine that you have a large heavy box sitting on the floor. In this case we're relating it to cornering, so we don't want it to slide. But let's say you have an energetic young child nearby who is not going to leave the box alone, but he will either push on it or sit/jump on it depending what you tell him to do. If he pushes on the side of the box, it will obviously slide (and we don't want that). But no matter how long he sits on top of it, or how hard he jumps on the top of it it won't budge. Now applying that to a bike: if you picture a bike at mid-corner (from either the front or the rear), the inside footpeg is actually to the side of the tyre contact patch. Therefore if you put alot of weight on that inside footpeg, it's as if you're pushing the side of that box. But if you picture the outside 'peg it is above the contact patch, so if you stomp on the outside 'peg it's as if you're jumping on top of the box - much less affect on the traction (if any).

 

Does that make sense? That's how I've always thought of it. Anyway I've got enough to think about with my riding at the moment, I'm not going to think about footpeg weighting until I get to do the CSS level that covers it. I still manage to be comfortably 'locked in' on the bike, but if I had to put a figure on it, I'd say that 10% or less of my weight is going to the outside 'peg, the rest is simply sitting on the seat.

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Mugget

 

That does make sense. The image gives me something to bear in mind.

 

It would also seem to echo Hotfoot and FajitaDave in the recent Quantum Mechanics thread:

 

Like hotfoot said the suspension works much more efficiently when the bike is as close as possible to vertical. I think another potential advantage of using body position is tire wear ...

 

Thanks

 

Ago

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just finished TOTW II a few days ago and decided to give weighting the outside peg a shot.

 

I'm in the process of completely revamping my body position and riding style after six years of sportbike riding so all of this is taking conscientious effort and is like taking two steps forward and one step back.

 

The hangoff was unnerving at first but weighting the outside peg is giving me a more "locked in" feel so I don't feel like I'm going to fall off the bike.

 

The biggest payoff so far from weighting the outside peg though has been the pivot steering effect which solved a problem I had with running wide in fast sweepers. I blamed it on everything from suspension setup to decreasing radius and off camber turns, nether true.

 

I press hard on the outside foot peg now and almost by magic my line tightens up and I'm back hard on the gas.

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I just finished TOTW II a few days ago and decided to give weighting the outside peg a shot.

 

I'm in the process of completely revamping my body position and riding style after six years of sportbike riding so all of this is taking conscientious effort and is like taking two steps forward and one step back.

 

The hangoff was unnerving at first but weighting the outside peg is giving me a more "locked in" feel so I don't feel like I'm going to fall off the bike.

 

The biggest payoff so far from weighting the outside peg though has been the pivot steering effect which solved a problem I had with running wide in fast sweepers. I blamed it on everything from suspension setup to decreasing radius and off camber turns, nether true.

 

I press hard on the outside foot peg now and almost by magic my line tightens up and I'm back hard on the gas.

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Weighing the outside peg provides you leverage lock on to the bike and transition your hips and upper-body to the inside of the turn w/ out using your arms & handle bar to get over.

 

During our level III drill, we were taught to establish our body position for an upcoming turn-point by doing a toe raise (press up w/ the balls of your foot) against the outside peg (this lifts up your outside heel, contracts your quadricep/glute and drives your knee into the tank), while having your heel against the heel guard for additional leverage...this enables you to anchor your outside leg against the bike and use the force from pushing against the peg to get your hips & upper body into position (inside of the turn). Try the drill around a corner you are comfortable in, at 75% of your typical speed. If you have problems getting around the tank, scoot back away from the tank to give you room to get around it.

 

Another way of looking at it is...when walking or standing up on the ground...you pivot from your outside foot to turn into the opposite direction...it's the same bio-physical mechanics/principle to get your body to move to other direction while keeping your upper body relaxed. I hope this helps...if it doesn't make sense, blame it on jet lag!

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Weightng the outside peg for me was more of a matter of making the outside leg the place to push off of and into the bars. A way to apply even more pressure at the bars than the arms alone could provide. The newly added Tech Spec pads make the knee lock that much better which allows the pressure on the outside peg to be a great assist in countersteering. It's another of those "ah, ha" moments for me.

 

 

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Hmmm... I've gotta get up to Level 3 and see what this is all about...

 

I think I just have a different idea of what 'weighting the peg' means. To me, if I told someone I was weighting the peg, I would mean that the majority of my weight was on the footpeg (rather than the seat). But as I ride now I just 'lock in' my outside leg, but I am well and truly sat on the seat with the majority of my weight. I wouldn't say that I 'push' on the outside peg at all.

 

I've never had a problem when moving my body to get setup for a corner. I always do that when the bike is upright, so it's just as if I'm making a movement to 'stand up' with both feet. Then at the end of that movement I make a quick check with the foot which will be to the outside of the corner to make sure my foot/ankle/knee are 'locked in'.

 

But I'll see if I can have a play around and find out what you guys are talking about.

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If I can add my 2penny worth here (2 cents for our American cousins!)

It seems that we have 2 separate activities:

Locking the outside leg into the tank and

Weighting the outside peg.

 

If I could deal with the latter first:

Weighting the outside peg aids traction when accelerating out of a corner.

It does it through 2 things: weighting the outside peg transfers weight and enables the bike to sit on a fatter part of the tyre for a given corner speed. 2ndly and more importantly when the rear breaks traction pre-weighting the outside peg helps enable the bike to stand up more quickly as the tyre starts to spin which rolls it onto a lager radius and a fatter contact patch helping the tyre regain traction.

Still skeptical? Try it on a dirt bike - weight the inside peg as you go round a tight bend and apply the power. Pick the bike up off the deck and try the same maneuver whilst weighting the outside peg.

 

Locking your outside leg into the tank enables you to secure you to the bike to perform a number of operations without unsettling the bike : power steering, hip flick, etc.

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OK, gonna stir the pot a tiny bit...does it matter for weighting, if it's the inside or the outside? Does the bike know the difference from the standpoint of weight trasnferred to the rear?

 

CF

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OK, gonna stir the pot a tiny bit...does it matter for weighting, if it's the inside or the outside? Does the bike know the difference from the standpoint of weight trasnferred to the rear?

 

CF

 

I have asked myself the same question and here is what I think is true .. weighting the pegs wont change the lean angle, weight the outside peg does increase the traction on the rear tire .. IMHO

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I'd say yes absolutely it matters which peg is weighted. And just to clarify - the only reason we're talking about the affect on the rear is because we're focusing on acceleration out of a corner, right? Because most of the weight/forces etc. are transferred to the rear tyre under acceleration? But I'd also say that it could have a big affect on both front and rear tyres mid-corner as well. It would make sense that as the lean angle decreases, the difference between outside/inside peg weighting would not be as much, you would expect to be able to transfer the weight to either without much change.

 

Thinking about this some more, I realised where I may be able to use some peg weighting. Just about every time I open the throttle to drive out of a corner, the rear tyre will slip just a little bit. Never even occurred to me that I could do something to stop it, I thought that was just the limit of the tyres (Power Pure - definitely a street tyre, the Michelin usage chart recommends 20% track riding). So I'm guessing the right time to add some weight to the rear peg is mid-corner, right at the moment (or just before) the throttle is opened? I will try and experiment with this and report back with my results.

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With the bike leaned over and with any decent speed (say over 50mph) how much will it matter which peg is weighted? Both are connected to the frame...any engineers want to take as stab a this? (try to esplain in real English for the geometrically challenged).

 

CF

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With the bike leaned over and with any decent speed (say over 50mph) how much will it matter which peg is weighted? Both are connected to the frame...any engineers want to take as stab a this? (try to esplain in real English for the geometrically challenged).

 

CF

 

 

OK, I'll take a shot at this; not sure I can manage plain English, though. :) First, let's tackle weighting the pegs (either, or both) as opposed to sitting with all your weight on the seat. When you need to steer the bike, you have to lean it over, or rotate it about its roll axis. Putting weight on the pegs instead of on the seat puts your weight closer to the center of mass which makes it easier to steer the bike, because the bike rotates around the center of mass. (As Keith puts it in Twist II, "The center of mass is the part of the bike that moves the least, so getting your weight closer to it means you have to move that weight less distance"- see page 85 in Twist of the Wrist II.)

 

Hypothetically, once the bike is leaned over, putting more weight on the inside peg would put the weight lower than putting it on the outside peg, and possibly that could help tighten your line - however you are talking about trying to overcome substantial gyroscopic forces, so unless you are going paralyzingly slow, I don't think it would make very much difference - certainly not enough to overcome the better BODY stability and anchor points we get from putting weight on the outside peg instead.

 

Weighting the outside peg helps you get a very strong pivot point from which to initiate your counter-steering effort (which of course takes more effort if you are going fast), and this aspect is so important that I think it far outweighs any marginal benefit you could get from weighting the inside peg. I also think switching weight from one peg to the other mid-turn (to try to tighten your line) could cause instability in your body and thus possibly wiggle the bike, not desirable mid turn.

 

One other point - I'm speculating here, but if the rear tire was already at the edge of traction (slippery surface, for example), it seem to me that weighting the inside peg more than the outside would introduce a rotational force that would want to make the bike roll MORE to the inside - potentially breaking loose that rear tire. (In contrast, using hook turn instead would put the weight to the front, using the front suspension to help tighten the line.) Obviously gyroscopic forces are much stronger (at speed) but if the bike is already about to slide out, seems to me that weight on the inside peg would NOT improve the situation.

 

Do I recall that dirt riders, when traversing a steep hill, weight the outside peg to keep the rear tire from sliding out?

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