Sports Cycle

Best Bike For Beginners : Starting Out with Small Motorcycle !

Probably the most common mistake new riders make when choosing their first bike is buying a bike that’s too large for them to learn to ride easily. I’d like to explain a little about how motorcycles work here so you’ll understand this important point. By nature, motorcycles are unstable vehicles : If you don’t hold them up some way, they fall over. When you ride, your bike is held up by its own inertia; its spinning tires create gravitational energy.

But anytime your motorcycle is not traveling in a perfectly straight line, its weight shifts around in a manner you may be totally unused to. When traveling, a motorcycle doesn’t follow its front wheels around a corner like a car does; instead, the bike leans around corners, rotating around a central axis, much like an airplane. Because of this, you don’t steer a motorcycle the way you drive a car. Instead, you countersteer it, using the handlebar to lever the motorcycle into a lean and initiate a turn.

The point I’m trying to make here is that on the road, motorcycles move around a lot, in weird ways. This takes some getting used to, even on a lightweight motorcycle. On a heavier bike, this can be so disconcerting, it scares a new rider into never learning to steer the motorcycle properly.


The people who seem to run into the most trouble are those who choose a heavyweight cruiser or a big touring motorcycle for their first bike. Perhaps it’s a Freudian thing, but size seems to be some sort of a status symbol for cruiser riders. As a popular T-shirt slogan says, Size does matter. Unfortunately, for a new rider, it matters in a negative way.

For one thing, the heavy weight makes the motorcycle tend to ride in a straight line, even when you attempt to negotiate a turn. The more bike weight you have, the more you have to wrestle the machine through every turn. In addition, excessive weight can be especially problematic in cruisers because of certain handling characteristics common to the breed. Because of the steering geometry required to give cruisers their chopper-like look, they tend not to be the best-handling bikes on the road. To many novice riders, the bikes feel as if they are going to flop over. This feeling is unsettling enough for an experienced rider; it’s a distraction a novice does not need.

Trying to master a large touring bike is also usually a mistake for a novice. I’ve seen the enthusiasm of a lot of new riders nipped in the bud after they bought an ultimate behemoth - type touring bike before they were ready. When you get in over your head on one of these machines, their heavy weight is going to hurt you. When things start to go wrong on an 800-pound motorcycle, they go wrong fast.

We all fall into the “bigger is better” trap. For years, I rode a Honda ST1100, a 700 - pounder and one of the finest sport-touring motorcycles in the world. I enjoyed it so much, I may never have ridden anything else, had fate not intervened. A balloon payment coming due on my condo forced me to sell the big ST1100 and get a small, cheap motorcycle. I missed the big Honda, but in the process, I rediscovered the pleasure of riding a small, nimble motorcycle. Now, if I were forced to only have one bike, I would choose a lightweight sporty motorcycle over a larger machine.

But you can go to the other extreme, too. While selecting a motorcycle that is too large can ruin your enthusiasm for the sport, if you select one that is too small, you will soon outgrow the bike.

Starting Out Slow

New sportbike riders tend not to have weight-related problems, because sportbikes are light, maneuverable motorcycles.

While they are not physically large machines, the problem with sportbikes has to do with power - specifically, the fact that they have too much of it for a novice rider. Grab a handful of throttle on one of these machines, and you’ll be traveling at over 100 miles per hour before your brain even has a chance to register your change in velocity. The slowest of these bikes is a wicked-fast machine, and before you buy one for your first bike, you should honestly assess your self-control. These bikes present a challenge for even the most experienced rider ; for a beginner, they are expensive forms of suicide.