Originally Posted by
Slaninar
I don't fully agree. For one thing, I had personally experienced improvement of basic running skills - with training. You seem to be missing an important point in your reasoning (IMO) - learning consciously and properly is needed first, before the moves become automatic. You can do it OK even without training, but proper and conscious training can help one improve - THEN training it until the improved technique becomes automatic.
This goes for any sport and skill, including cycling.
Yes, and I don't disagree. Some things have better or worse ways to do them, and one "learns" the right or best way then drills to make it automatic.
A good examples are musicians tasked with playing difficult passages. They learn specific fingering sequences to avoid the trap of getting caught at an impossible transition.
But counter steering a bicycle becomes automatic on it's own, because it's part of the natural process of keeping a bike upright. The expression that once you learn to ride a bike you never forget is true. The skill can get rusty through lack of practice, but the process is burned into the brain for life.
This is why we cannot ride a bicycle with reverse steering inputs. Someone who's never ridden learns very quickly, but anybody who's ever ridden a bicycle, even 50 years ago cannot unlearn without great effort and time. And once you've learned to ride a backward bike, you won't be able to ride a normal one. Apparently the autopilot system cannot store two systems and switch back and forth. This makes bike riding (which is controlled in the cerebellum) very different from being multi lingual (which is controlled in the cerebrum).