And that is a great alternate way to look at steering a bike. You kick it out from under and then catch it. When you're done changing direction you steer it back under yourself. I've tried to stick to the whole "push the bars" method because I think it's a better way to describe it for folks like firstian in a way that they can directly use.

But I've often riden along on my way to work thinking just the same as you. When I think of it that way it's all about moving the contact patches in relation to whereever the apparent gravity pull happens to be at the moment. We keep it in line with the apparent G force to stay stable be it in a turn or upright and we use the steering to shift where the contact patch is to make us "fall" away from the direction we moved it. Oddly enough that may mean we "fall" back up to upright. Obviously I think strange stuff when I'm faced with the psychological pressures of going to work....

You can pretty much say that it's like balancing a broom handle end on in your palm. You constanty adjust to keep your hand moving back under the handle. If you want to walk with it you have to pull your hand BACK for a split second to start the handle falling forward. Then you walk ahead and back under it to get the balance back. At the end of the walk to stop you have to actually dash forward to get your hand past the handle a bit so it leans back for a moment until it stops moving and then you pull your hand back to directly under it. Turning the bike is sort of the same. You kick it to the side then turn in hard enough to balance it and stop the "fall" into the turn. At the end you steer it in harder to bring the bike back under yourself so you straighten up again.

At the risk of confusing poor firstian more than we have in the last couple of posts there's a philosophical way to look at steering a bike. We don't really steer a bicycle to make it go anywhere in a direct manner. All our steering is about maintaining or deliberatly upsetting our balance. But we learn to alter this balance so the bike teeters and tips about in a way that makes it go where we want it to go. Just like that broom handle is all about balance first and foremost and we bump the balance around to make it move where we want.

OK, now I'm officially guilty of WAAAAYYYYY over thinking the whole thing. Not that it's not valid but it's far more than you want in your head when you're just trying to learn to push the bars around and ride smoothly.