THREE ELEMENTS OF IMPROVING RIDER PERFORMANCE
THREE ELEMENTS OF IMPROVING RIDER PERFORMANCE
The human body and brain is incredible, if it is exposed to the right careful conditions it will both physically and mentally adapt to what it experiences. If it needs to get stronger, it gets stronger. If it needs to get fitter, it gets fitter. If it needs to calculate numbers it will get better and faster at calculating numbers. If it needs to remember and identify sounds, sights, feelings or whatever then the body and brain will increase its capacity to do so. If that experience is riding and working a horse your brain and body will adapt to this experience…..and here is the really cool bit….it will adapt to whatever level you set it up for! There are two great misconceptions about performance, firstly, people think talent is inherent…a special gift people are born with….and secondly, they think you can only get good at stuff when you are young. Both are wrong, very wrong.
There is no such thing as inherent talent. No one is born with talent or special gifts. There may be some physical traits such as height that may help in some activities but these activities are actually uncommon. Talent is something you LEARN and something you DEVELOP. Talent is a function of effort and the quality of HOW you practice and develop the mental and physical skills you need to do a particular activity whether that be singing, swimming, mathematics, playing the piano or riding a horse.
Getting good at stuff is also not the realm of the young. More and more research is discovering that the human body continues to physically and mentally adapt as adults. The main difference between children and adults is the care that needs to be taken with adults during training as we are more prone to injury. One of my favourite stories I just read was about a man who took up training in martial arts at the age of 69 after being inspired by his grandchildren. In this article I would like to briefly talk about how anyone can improve their ability, skills and performance with horses because you can……the only thing you need is a DESIRE to do so and an EFFECTIVE way to go about it.
So what is the effective way to go about it? Well there are 3 key things:
1. MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS THAT CONTINUALLY IMPROVE: What the hell are mental representations? Well your mental representations is the knowledge in your head about what a horse should feel like, act like, respond like and how you should feel like, act like, respond like. A simple example is your ability to determine if you are on the right or wrong trot diagonal in rising trot, or detecting the horse just shifting its weight back in its first attempt at backing up indicating a perfect release of pressure point to train the back-up response for the first time. Mental representations necessary to work and ride horses well are complex and layered but completely and utterly learnable.
Your level of performance depends on the quality of your mental representations. Improving your performance goes hand in hand with IMPROVING your mental representations. Therefore, this is where practice, coaching and feedback come into play….because it is these three things that put the growth and development of your mental representations on steroids as these three things allow your brain to add more detail and complexity to your mental representations which in turn makes you even more effective as a rider and trainer.
2. COACHING AND FEEDBACK: Working with horses is unique as you can get feedback from a good coach but also from your horse. Coaches help monitor your progress and should offer ways to address problems as well as guide your progression. You hear people say that you learn all you need about horses from the horse. Well this isn’t 100% true because horses cannot tell you all the effective ways of achieving what you would like to achieve with a horse – for this we need someone who has already worked that out to pass that information onto us and that is definitely the job of the coach….but horses definitely tell you how effective your approach is being! If you are constantly dealing with resistance and a failure to progress your horse in training that is a big red flag of feedback that WHAT you are doing and HOW you are doing it is FLAWED and you need some help. An example of this was years ago when I was struggling along with my hard mouth horse, tightening my noseband up and swapping bits almost on a daily basis, that was actually my horse screaming at me that I had a training flaw and instead of fixing the horse’s understanding and confidence with the bit I was trying to solve a training problem mechanically and of course the problem only resolved the problem with training!
3. PRACTICE WITH DEFINED SPECIFIC GOALS: Learning to work horses requires you to be greatly aware that the horse will only perform as well as YOUR skill level and YOUR mental representations and YOUR core strength. Therefore, when I coach people I set them into a program that targets the person’s SKILL development as well as the horse’s LEARNING and quality of their RESPONSE. Most of the horse world focuses so much on the horse but viewing training from a horse centric perspective misses out the most significant and important thing needed for success and that is the development of the human’s knowledge, skills and overall competence. So what I do is I combine a program that works to develop the person and the horse together. I develop a person’s mental representations with a specific process and insights and that is then REFLECTED in the performance of the horse. This is because performance is impacted by not just what the person does but how and why they do it. They need to do exercises that teach them to apply pressure, release pressure, lower their energy, increase their energy, changing the thoughts in their heads and to perform every single interaction with positive emotions and an optimistic mindset….and that is before they sit on horse! To sit on a horse there needs awareness of their balance and core strength to be able to reduce a rider’s “white noise” impacting the horse and ultimately their ability to minimise the pressure the horse experiences.
Sounds complex? It is! Getting good takes effort….lots of effort and there are ups and downs along the way that make you dig deep. But, then there is the rewards…..the fun times, the friendships, the many many achievements……like when people see their anxious or grumpy horse chill for the first time……and then there is this tremendous sense of pride when people look back on how far they have come and more importantly how much happier their horse is. All this is possible because talent is something that lies inside every single person and it can be grown at any age at any time….it just requires effort to unlock it.
