It’s been building for a few decades now, but the forces behind some popular psychology and self-development techniques have reached epic proportions in some spheres. In some of these, breathing plays a pretty important role. Well, in reality it’s an essential life critical one, but what I mean is that..

In my earlier article What is Rhythm? and in Stage 1 of this series about reading the race circuit, I talk about how one of the most important skills for finding and improving upon your racing performance is being able to read the race circuit effectively. In Stage 1 I gave a brief overview of how we get to know our world and described a way for you to build on what you know by getting different views of the circuit and letting it sink in.

Stage 2 is more about understanding what were you doing and why.

In my article What is Rhythm? I highlight that one of the most important skills for finding good racing performance is being able to read the race circuit effectively. In that article, I describe the race circuit as sheet of music a racer must read to find their rhythm. The racing lines and the way the bike is ridden is an expression of how the circuit has been read by the racer. This depends on perception - how we get to know our world through our senses.

I think that not reading the circuit well is one of the biggest limiting factors to a racer's performance, both in lap times and in their available mental capacity. On the other hand, the best and most successful racers develop very good patterns of circuit reading and they know that this is the foundation of their performance.

In this second part of 'Why you should always walk the circuit', we're going to look at some softer psychological benefits to walking the circuit that racers often don't think about or recognise. The main benefit we're going to talk about is how it can help you to prepare yourself for racing.

There are numerous reasons why walking the circuit is so important if you want to a) improve your racing performance, and/or b) have a more enjoyable and rewarding racing experience.

The first, and probably most important reason why you should do this is: it is the only way you can fully develop your circuit knowledge. Let's look at why: