Masterclass
Want to improve your sporting prowess? We get the low-down from a former world champ.
The best way to learn or improve at something is to have some tuition from a master. CDB went along to a Schreiber Trials School.
Having spent a lot of years in sports coaching outside of the trials scene, Bernie Schreiber has a wider view on how to achieve improvement than someone who has only ever been involved in our sport.
On being invited along to his trials school held the day after Inverness and DMCC’s Highland Classic Two Day Trial on the Alvie estate at Aviemore, Bernie promised a trials school unlike any other.
I was intrigued to see how this wider view would translate into riding a motorcycle over rough terrain and keeping one’s feet up while maintaining forward motion. The simple answer is ‘very well.’
The Schreiber Experience is a full day and as promised this was a different approach to a normal trials school. For a start it began in a classroom and while there wasn’t a written exam at the end of it there was a booklet to back up first the talk and then the riding.
Bernie Schreiber’s credentials are, or should be, well known by trials riders the world over and include obviously a world championship, plus an SSDT win and numerous world trials round wins and a few USA national championships too.
As well as Bultaco, Bernie has ridden Italjet, SWM, Fantic and Yamaha and co-authored a book on
observed trials. While at the forefront of the new style of riding with its bunny hops, pivot turns, nose wheelies and such things, Bernie was staying within the rules of trials as they were at that time and was maintaining forward motion as he was hopping and pivoting.
Using his experiences with golfers, footballers and other sports professionals, Bernie has honed what went into the original book and broken his teaching into certain key areas which will help a rider advance. By pointing out certain key areas to focus attention on and explaining how he arrived at these areas and what he did to improve his performance in them, the Class of 2019 had much food for thought.
One of the major points stressed during the day was that it was the riders themselves who caused the lack of progress, by putting perceived obstacles in their own way. We’re not talking about a rock step or a muddy turn, but an attitude where trying to attempt too much all at once can overwhelm someone. A suggestion to take an alternative approach in a practise section, such as breaking it down into thirds or quarters or more and tackle each bit individually before adding them together was a method met with scepticism initially, until it was shown to work.
There were of course some ‘givens’ – such as don’t practise what you know you can do, practise what you don’t know how to do, but how many of us actually do that? As the class took to the outside and some practise sections, Bernie demonstrated what he’d spoken about in the classroom: breaking down sections, showing how to actually plan a route through a section, using the whole available width to make turns easier and more.
Now the pupils understood the benefits of proper weight distribution, allowing the motorcycle to move around, the effects of
‘weighting’ or loading up suspension to create the force to bunny hop over obstacles.
Schreiber also showed a different way of thinking and his answer to the ‘lack of concentration’ issue highlighted by a couple of students was disarmingly simple.
He bounced the question back and asked “how long are you at maximum concentration during a six-hour trial?” Would you have said 10 or 12 minutes – equating to the time spent on trial in a section rather than riding to a section?
During the day there were a few key phrases used to make certain aspects stick in the mind, phrases such as ‘a goal without a plan is nothing but a dream’ the inference there is the plan makes the goal achievable and it doesn’t matter if your goal is to beat your riding buddy at the next club trial or take on the cream of the world, a plan is needed.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking traditional throttle, brake and clutch control was ignored, it wasn’t, but the Schreiber Experience is about showing how these controls all work together along with the thought process to improve results.
Once out in the rough terrain these machine handling skills were put to the test. Each person gained a little one-to-one advice as Bernie watched each person through a section and positioned himself to instruct a rider as to where they should be placing wheels, when a turn should begin, at what point should the throttle be snapped open or the clutch dipped.
All in all a fascinating approach to the sport of trials riding and how to improve at it. Catching a few riders before they left I wanted to know if they
had found the advice beneficial. Without exception all found themselves being more focussed on their riding and viewing sections with a different thought process and more than a few realised they’d fallen into bad habits but now had the ability to think about what they were doing and perhaps break them.