How To Fit Your Bike - Adventure Motorcycle Ergonomics - Ride Comfortably and Efficiently

There are catalogs and websites full of parts for your bike with risers and custom levers and seats of different sizes and heights and configurations all to make that bike custom to you. Having that bike properly fitted does make a difference in performance control and comfort. I'm going to show you how to properly fit your bike. Adventure bikes are configured for the street when they come from the dealer. So we need to set them up so we can use them off-road and on the street. And when I set them up I always start right at the foundation. A bike set up for the street will put the shift lever equal to the top of the foot peg. The problem with the adventure bike is we have large off-road boots that are difficult to get underneath the levers. The first thing we need to do is adjust this up so we can get underneath it when we're standing and then when we're riding we need to downshift we can just tap the top of the lever. There's two basic configurations this one here is set on splines and there's a pinch bolt right at the bottom so I'm going to remove that pinch bolt shift the lever up one spline and that'll give us just enough height. Once I have this off I'm just going to shift it just so slightly this way once it goes back on means that now from this position it's much easier for me to get underneath it and I can still get up on top of the lever. This is the halfway point between off-road and on-road. Don't forget to put your pinch bolt back in. This is a very common fine tune adjustment. These nuts here are jam nuts one is going to be a standard thread one will be a reverse. To adjust the lever here simply turn this adjuster raise it to the position that fits you. On the other side of the bike you'll seldom find adjustments for the rear brake but if you do you want to raise that lever so it's the same height as the top of your foot peg. If you're not able to adjust the actual lever you may be able to find an aftermarket component that puts a step or raises the height of the brake pedal to be the same height as the top of the foot peg. So this bike has a two-step so I can catch one edge for the road and I can catch the higher step when I'm off-road. When the handlebars are set up ideal for the street my shoulders are relaxed my elbows are down and I have this natural downward slant to the handlebars so my wrists are nice and relaxed. The problem with this for adventure riding is when I stand up and forward on the bike now I've got a kink in my wrist and my shoulders end up in front of the handlebars which means I don't have a good relaxed position off-road. So we need to make an adjustment rotating these handlebars just far enough forward to get them in front of my shoulders. Typically the handlebars have four bolts that clamp them down and hold them in position. What we end up doing is loosening up two or four of those. I'll rotate the handlebars forward so your hands don't end up angled so much that they're they're twisted. You're looking until they just kind of level off. When you're standing the handlebar should be just slightly forward of your shoulders. When sitting the handlebars will be a slightly farther reach which should still feel pretty natural on the wrist angle. Once you find that position tighten those bolts back down. The next step is getting the levers at the right angle. In an ideal situation when your hands are on the handlebars and you extend your fingers out they should land directly on top of the lever. In this case because I rotated the handlebars up I get a very significant kink in my wrist and it bends down. For off-road when you're standing position and you extend those fingers they'll also end up on top of the levers. To set this properly you split the difference. Just like the handlebars this is set up with a pinch bolt setup. Loosen up the pinch bolt, rotate the controls and from a sitting position you should be able to reach out and just have the very slight angle on the hand. To test that it's correct stand up and you should also end up with a slight bend at the wrist from the standing position. If it ends up very kinked in either direction split the difference between the two. Once you find the ideal position lock it back down. Setting the engagement zone properly means that you can disengage the clutch completely when you pull it in with two fingers and it pinches up against the two fingers around the handlebars. When we're riding off-road we want to be using two fingers on the clutch two fingers around the bars so if we hit a root or a log or some kind of movement on the road it can't jump out of our hands. That's why we're not using four fingers. As soon as you start to ease that clutch into the engagement area it should come come into engagement right as it comes off the fingers so you don't want to have a lot of travel before that clutch starts to engage. This bike has an adjustable lever and all you have to do is spin this lever to the number that you like so that the engagement zone is set in the correct position. You'll do the same thing with the brake. You'll want to set that adjustment so that you can use full brakes with just two fingers. The final adjustment is going to be free play on the throttle. From the factory they put roughly 10 to 15 millimeters of free play which means there's movement in that throttle before it actually engages power. You want to dial all of that out so that it has as close to zero as possible. This throttle has zero free play there's no movement before power engages. They all have a fine-tune adjustment up near the throttle itself somewhere and you'll dial that out until the free play is out. It's important to make sure that it's not going to bind. Before you go ride have the motorcycle running in neutral and turn the handlebars all the way left and all the way to the right to make sure it doesn't rev. If the bike starts to rev you need to put more free play back into the throttle. Like I said you want to get as close to zero as possible but not where it revs when the handlebars turn. The purpose of having zero free play means that you have fine motor control when you're off-road and you're not trying to take slack out and guess when you're going to have power. You're not going to run out of power before it hits all the way to the stop. It only takes a few minutes to get your bike set up right and if you've never done this before just make marks so if you don't like what you did you can go right back to where it was set up. However sometimes the factory settings don't give you enough adjustment to optimize it for you. If you're over six foot maybe you'll need risers you can play around with those. If you're maybe a little short of stature or the bike's a little too tall then you might be able just to either put shorter shocks on it or just drop the preload on both sides to drop your actual total ride height. That could be helpful. There's seats you can change so you can put a taller seat on that way it takes less energy to move from a sitting position to a standing position or put a lower seat on it just so you can reach the ground. When your bike is ergonomically adjusted it'll be more comfortable and you'll be in better control.