Half the adventure bikes on the market have an 850 mm seat. A lot of very good riders are 168 cm. Here is how that gets solved, and why the answer is almost never “get taller boots”.
The question nobody asks out loud
It comes in by email, usually apologetically, usually from somebody who has been riding for twenty years. I am five foot six. Can I do this?
The answer is yes, and the reason it needs a three-thousand-word article rather than a one-word one is that the wrong bike will make a fortnight miserable and the right one will make it invisible. Seat height is the single most under-discussed variable in adventure touring, and it is discussed badly when it is discussed at all, mostly by tall men telling short people to just get used to it.
So this is the practical version: what actually matters, what does not, and what to ask an operator before you book.
Where the problem actually is
Here is the thing that surprises people. Seat height is almost irrelevant at speed. A bike is a bike once it is moving; nobody’s inseam matters at eighty kilometres an hour through a series of bends.
The problem lives entirely in the low-speed and stationary moments, and there are five of them.
Stopping on a camber, where the road falls away on the side your foot is going down. Stopping on a surface that is not flat, which in Asia is most surfaces. Manoeuvring in a car park at the end of a long day, tired, in the heat. Turning the bike round on a narrow mountain road because the group missed a junction. And picking it up when it goes over.
Every one of those is a moment where being able to get a foot down properly is the difference between a non-event and a dropped motorcycle. And every one of them happens several times a day on a motorbike tour.
The number that matters is not the one in the brochure
Manufacturers quote a seat height measured in a specific way, unladen, and it tells you less than you think.
What actually determines whether you can get a foot down is the combination of seat height, seat width at the point where your thighs sit, and how much the suspension sags under your weight. A narrow seat at 860 mm can be more manageable than a wide one at 830, because the wide one splays your legs outward before they start going down.
Suspension sag is the variable riders forget. A bike set up for a ninety-kilo rider will barely compress under a sixty-kilo one, meaning a lighter rider effectively sits higher than the spec sheet suggests. Adjusting preload for actual rider weight is free, takes ten minutes, and can hand back twenty or thirty millimetres.
Then there is boot sole thickness, which is worth twenty to twenty-five millimetres and which is the one thing on this list you can change by buying something.
The fixes, in order of how much they help
Choose a different bike. This is first by a wide margin and it is the one people resist. A mid-capacity adventure machine with a lower seat will do every road on any of our routes, and the rider will be fresher at five in the afternoon than somebody wrestling something taller.
Set the preload properly for your weight. Free, reversible, effective.
A low seat option, which many manufacturers offer and which typically buys twenty to thirty millimetres. Rental fleets sometimes have them.
A lowering link, which changes the rear suspension geometry. This works and it has costs: reduced ground clearance, altered handling, and on a genuinely rough road it means the bashplate finds things it would otherwise have cleared. Worth it for a road-based route, questionable for the Altai.
Boots with a thick sole. Real, modest, and free if you were buying boots anyway.
Shaving the seat foam, which a trimmer can do and which is permanent. Effective, and it costs you comfort on a long day, which is a poor trade on a fortnight-long trip.
The technique that matters more than any of it
Riders who are short and confident all do the same things, and none of them are secrets.
They do not try to get both feet down. They put one foot down properly, flat and load-bearing, and keep the other on the peg. Two tiptoes is worse than one flat foot in every situation that matters.
They slide off the seat as they come to a stop, shifting their backside to the side they are putting the foot down. That single movement is worth more than any lowering link.
They choose where to stop. Coming to a halt at a junction, they look at the camber and put the bike where the road is flat or falling toward their good side. Nobody tall thinks about this; nobody short who has been riding a while does anything else.
They use the rear brake at walking pace, which stabilises the bike and stops it lurching as it settles.
And they back into parking spaces on foot before they get on, rather than trying to reverse a heavy bike uphill while seated.
Picking it up, which is technique and not strength
The most useful ten minutes any rider can spend, and the one most likely to matter to somebody who is not tall or heavy.
Kill the engine. Put the side stand down before you start, so there is somewhere to put the bike when it comes up. Turn the bars toward the ground. Put your back against the seat, take a grip on the bar or a solid frame point with one hand and the pillion peg or grab rail with the other, plant your feet, and walk backwards using your legs with your back straight.
You are not lifting with your arms and you are definitely not lifting with your spine. Riders of fifty-five kilos routinely stand up two-hundred-and-thirty-kilo motorcycles this way. Riders of ninety kilos who try to heave with their arms cannot.
Practise it once, on grass, before the trip. Almost nobody does, and it is the single most confidence-building thing on this list.
What the fleet question really is
When somebody asks an operator “do you have a low bike”, the useful answer is not a yes or no. It is a list with numbers on it.
Ask for the actual seat heights of the machines available on your dates. Ask whether preload can be set for your weight before you arrive. Ask whether any of them have a low seat option fitted. And describe yourself honestly: height, inseam if you know it, weight, and what you ride at home.
An operator who answers that with specifics has thought about it. One who says “you’ll be fine” has not, and you will spend a fortnight finding out.
The related question is what the route demands. A road-based Thai loop is forgiving of a lowered bike. The Mongolian Altai, with river crossings and rock, is not, and the honest answer there may be that a different route suits you better this year.
The reach problem, which is separate
Seat height gets all the attention and it is only half of the ergonomics question. The other half is reach, and it affects different people.
Bar position matters. A rider with shorter arms on a wide adventure bar is stretched forward, which puts weight on the wrists and makes slow-speed steering inputs harder to make precisely. Bar risers or a set of pull-back clamps fix it for very little money.
Lever reach is the one that catches people with smaller hands, and it is the easiest fix in motorcycling. Almost every modern bike has adjustable clutch and brake levers, and almost nobody adjusts them. Being able to reach the lever with the first two fingers, comfortably, without stretching, changes how confidently you can modulate the clutch in a slow turn. Ask for it at the handover and it takes thirty seconds.
Screen height matters for a different reason: a tall screen set for a tall rider puts the turbulent air exactly at the helmet of a shorter one, which produces buffeting and a headache by the third hour. Most screens adjust. Say something on day one rather than enduring it.
Two-up changes the maths again
If you are riding with a pillion and you are not tall, everything above gets harder and it is worth planning for.
The extra seventy or eighty kilos sits high and behind you, which raises the effective centre of gravity and makes the bike considerably less willing to be caught once it starts leaning. The suspension compresses more, which helps slightly with reach and hurts with ground clearance.
The specific danger moment is mounting and dismounting, and the protocol matters more than usual: the rider settles first with both feet down and the front brake on, the pillion gets on only when told, and never gets off until the rider says so.
It is entirely doable and plenty of couples tour that way. It simply means the machine choice matters more, not less, and that a lower and lighter bike is the right answer even if the rider could manage something taller solo.
Height is not the same as skill, and the industry keeps confusing them
Worth saying plainly because the marketing does not.
Adventure bikes got tall for reasons that have nothing to do with riders: long suspension travel for off-road capability, and a styling language that reads as capable. The overwhelming majority of those bikes never leave tarmac, and the height they carry is buying an ability nobody uses at a cost everybody pays.
Meanwhile some of the most capable riders in any group are the shorter ones, precisely because they have had to develop technique that taller riders never needed. Somebody who has spent fifteen years managing a bike they cannot flat-foot has better slow-speed control than somebody who has never had to think about it.
The corollary is that nobody should feel apologetic about the question, and anybody who makes a rider feel small for asking it, in either sense, is not worth riding with.
What we actually put people on
Our fleets run a spread rather than a single machine, and the reason is exactly this conversation. There are big adventure bikes for riders who want them and can handle them, and mid-capacity machines with lower seats that will do every road on the route without asking anything of your inseam.
On the Himalayan and Nepali routes the standard machine is a Royal Enfield Himalayan, which is one of the friendliest bikes in this respect: relatively low, relatively light, and mechanically simple enough that a village mechanic can help. There are shorter alternatives available for riders who want them.
In Thailand the fleet is broader and the answer depends on what you are used to. A rider who tours a big bike at home will be handed something similar. A rider who does not should say so, because the machine that flatters you is the one you will enjoy the trip on.
The luggage factor nobody mentions
One more variable, and it is the one a supported trip changes completely.
A bike with two loaded panniers and a top box is not the same object as the same bike unladen. The centre of gravity rises, the weight increases by thirty or forty kilos, and the moment when it starts going over becomes much harder to catch. A rider who can comfortably manage a bare bike may struggle with the same machine fully loaded.
Which is why the support vehicle matters more to a shorter rider than to anybody else. Riding with a tank bag and nothing else, while the luggage travels in the van, removes the single biggest aggravating factor from every low-speed situation described in this article.
It is a real and underrated argument for a supported guided tour over a self-loaded one, and it applies to plenty of riders who are not short at all.
What the fleet actually offers, and how to read a spec sheet
When you look at a rental fleet or a tour operator’s bike list, the numbers that matter are not the ones printed largest.
Seat height is quoted unladen and usually for the standard seat, so a bike listed at 840 mm may sit at 820 with a rider on it and 810 with the low seat fitted. Ask which figure is being quoted.
Kerb weight tells you what you are picking up, and it is a better predictor of how a bike feels in a car park than capacity is. A 500 cc single at 190 kg is a friendlier object than a 900 cc twin at 230 kg, whatever the engine numbers say.
Wheel size matters indirectly. A 21-inch front wheel raises the whole front of the bike and signals a machine built for dirt; a 19-inch front usually means a road-biased adventure bike that sits lower. On the road routes the 19 is the better tool for most people anyway.
And the thing no spec sheet gives you: seat width at the front edge, where your thighs pass. Two bikes with identical seat heights can feel completely different because one narrows sharply and the other does not. This is why sitting on the bike matters and why photographs do not answer the question.
Confidence, which is the real subject
Everything in this article is mechanical, and the thing it is actually about is not.
A rider who is not confident they can put a foot down rides differently. They approach junctions tense. They avoid U-turns. They pick a parking spot badly because they want to stop rather than to stop well. They tire faster, because low-grade anxiety across six hours is fatiguing.
Put the same person on a bike they can flat-foot and all of that disappears within an hour, and what emerges underneath is frequently a much better rider than anybody expected, because the technique was always there and the machine was in the way.
Which is why the seat height conversation is worth having properly before a motorcycle tour rather than being brushed off. It is not a minor comfort preference. It determines whether somebody spends a fortnight riding or a fortnight managing.
The number of people who have quietly not booked a big biking tour because they assumed the bikes would be too tall for them is, we suspect, considerable. It is the wrong reason not to come.
Heat, fatigue and the last hour of the day
The final piece, because it is when the drops happen.
Six hours in the heat in armour leaves you dehydrated and tired, and tired is when technique deteriorates. The rider who has been sliding off the seat cleanly all day forgets to at five in the afternoon in a gravel hotel car park on a slope.
The fix is not physical, it is procedural. Do the parking first, before the helmet comes off and the brain switches into evening mode. Take the extra thirty seconds to look at the ground before you commit. And if the spot is bad, put the bike somewhere else rather than proving something.
More tour bikes hit the deck in the last two hundred metres of the day than in all the mountain hairpins combined, and that is true for riders of every height.
Riding Asia for real
Every Big Bike Tours departure runs with a road captain, a tour guide, a mechanic and a support vehicle that carries the luggage, which means you ride light. Seat heights and preload are things we will talk to you about before you arrive rather than at the handover, and the fleet has a spread rather than one machine.
For a first trip where the roads are excellent and nothing is technical, the ten-day Amazing Thailand is the one we point riders at, and the five-day Lanna Kingdom is the shorter version. The fleet page lists what we run. Tell us your height and what you ride at home on WhatsApp and we will tell you honestly which machine and which motorbike tour suits you, including when the honest answer is a different route.
English 
Deutsch 
Español 
Français 
Italiano
Comments