Paradoxical Skills in Cycling and Walking

Paradoxical Skills in Cycling and Walking

Some things seem so natural that we never question whether we're doing them correctly. Riding a bicycle, walking — these are skills we learned as children and never revisited. After 20 years and 28,000 kilometers of cycling, I discovered I'd been doing it wrong the entire time. The same turned out to be true for walking.

Countersteering: The Motorcycle Lesson That Changed My Cycling

It all began when I enrolled in a motorcycle riding course. With two decades of cycling experience under my belt, I assumed the transition would be smooth. I was wrong — my cycling habits didn't help; they actively hindered me.

The key revelation was a technique called countersteering. The concept is counterintuitive: to turn right, you briefly push the handlebar to the left. This momentary opposite input shifts the contact patches of the wheels out from under the center of gravity, causing the bike to lean into the desired turn direction. Once the lean is established, the turn follows naturally.

Countersteering is the technique of deliberately putting the motorcycle (or bicycle) into a leaning position BEFORE the actual turn begins.

At low speeds, this effect is negligible — you can steer a bicycle at walking pace by simply turning the handlebars. But at higher speeds, countersteering becomes essential. Every experienced motorcyclist uses it, often without being able to articulate what they're doing.

After learning this technique on a motorcycle, I applied it to my bicycle. The difference was dramatic: turns became smoother, faster, and more confident. I could navigate tighter corners at higher speeds with better control. Twenty years of riding, and I had been muscling my way through turns using body weight alone, never understanding the underlying physics.

The Walking Problem: Why Your Feet Are Fighting You

The second revelation came from an even more fundamental activity: walking. The conventional advice — stand straight, step forward, land on the heel — turns out to be biomechanically inefficient.

The core issue: extending your leg forward and striking with the heel creates a braking force with every step. Each time your foot lands ahead of your center of gravity, it acts like a tiny brake, and your body must overcome that deceleration before propelling forward again. This wastes energy and transmits impact forces through your joints.

The Correct Technique

The better approach, which I learned from observing hikers carrying heavy backpacks, involves several key changes:

• Significant forward lean of the torso — not a hunch, but a deliberate tilt from the ankles, letting gravity assist forward movement
• Short, frequent steps — rather than long strides that require reaching ahead
• Foot placement directly under the center of gravity, not in front of it — this eliminates the braking phase entirely
• Slightly bent front leg at the moment of contact — this absorbs impact more naturally and maintains forward momentum

Hikers with heavy backpacks instinctively adopt this posture because the extra weight makes the inefficiency of heel-striking painfully obvious. The lean compensates for the load and keeps them moving forward efficiently.

The Results

After adopting this technique, my time on a regular 1.85 km route improved from 18–19 minutes to 15 minutes — a roughly 20% speed increase. But the improvement wasn't just about speed:

• Fatigue decreased noticeably — I arrived less winded and with less joint soreness
• Shoe sole wear changed — the heel area showed significantly less wear, confirming that impact forces were being distributed differently
• The technique felt sustainable over longer distances

Fast Walking and Slow Running: The Same Thing?

An interesting observation: once you adopt this technique, the boundary between fast walking and slow running nearly disappears. Both share the same characteristics:

• No "flight phase" — at least one foot is always in contact with the ground
• A slight forward lean of the torso
• The support foot contacts the ground under the center of gravity
• To accelerate, you simply increase the lean angle

Ultra-marathon runners intuitively use this short-stride technique. For example, Russian athlete Pavel Ivanov ran 540.56 km in 72 hours at an average speed of about 8.2 km/h — right at the boundary between fast walking and slow running. At such distances, efficiency matters far more than raw speed, and this technique delivers exactly that.

A Critique of Conventional Methods

This analysis raises uncomfortable questions about established disciplines. Race walking, with its distinctive hip-swiveling motion, exists precisely because the sport demands speed while prohibiting the "flight phase." The exaggerated hip movement is a compensation for the braking force created by the required straight-leg, heel-first technique. The rules of the sport enforce an inefficient gait, and the swivel is the body's way of working around it.

Nordic walking similarly works around rather than solves the fundamental problem. The poles provide propulsion to overcome the braking force of heel-striking, rather than eliminating the cause.

Many running instruction materials contradict each other on basic questions like foot strike pattern and body posture, suggesting that the biomechanics of human locomotion are less settled than we might assume.

Conclusion

It's never too late to start cycling correctly or walking quickly without back and joint pain — even if you've been doing it differently for decades. The physics doesn't change just because we've built habits around ignoring it. A small adjustment in technique can yield outsized improvements in speed, comfort, and sustainability.