Originally Posted by livedarklions

Imma going to say this--when anyone actually agrees on what countersteering actually means, then we can have a talk. If all you're saying is that any time the hands are counteracting or correcting any effects of a lean, it's countersteering, well, duh, of course that's happening. What I understand countersteering to mean is that the turn is initiated by a turn of the handlebars in the opposite direction. Frankly, I don't care what the bike's perspective is, all I know is that I never initiate a turn by turning my handlebars in the opposite direction. I also don't give a rat's behind about racing technique, but I'm actually a very competent bike handler, thank you very much.

My perception of what is going on, and again I don't care about the bike's "frame of reference" because I have one and it doesn't, is that steering from the handlebars initially at speed is not practical precisely because it's too easy to turn the wheel, so it's simply too crude a method of control for major attitude adjustment. Lean is also somewhat crude, but your cns has all sorts of unconscious mechanisms that will keep you from overdoing it to the point you'll flip over. So I perceive what's happening as my lean initiating the turn and my hands using their fine motor skills to control the turn with very small adjustments of the handlebars.

The fact that you guys keep going back to motorcycles actually demonstrates that you can't get around the fact that the effects you're describing are too small on the bicycles to be perceived. You also are obviously unaware that it's been demonstrated that gyroscopic forces play little to no role in bicycle handling by having people successfully ride and control bicycles where those gyroscopic forces are counteracted by wheels spinning in the opposite direction, so if your perception is that you are primarily riding on top of a pair of gyroscopes, your mental model is fundamentally flawed. But hey, if it helps you to think of it that way, I don't care.

I love that these conversations always degenerate into someone oversimplifying the physics, calling other people ignorant, moving the goalposts on what countersteering is, and exposing the fact that no one really understands how the human cns actually balances itself. I think it's a bit of a mystery why we can instinctively control the bicycle--3 year olds can balance and turn a bike, for crying out loud.