The Art of Training
The Art of Training
Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance
(Goal setting and Mental Preparation)
© Bert Hartog
These five words (also known as the five P's) just about sum up how we should enter a competition. Words can be so wonderful, a few words can tell the end-result of years of preparation. I believe that when we get very good at something it becomes a vocation or an art.
I can appreciate the artistry of the perfect golf swing or the beautiful performance of the ballet dancer. A few years ago I happened to meet the reigning World Champion Farrier, Martin Edwards from Scotland. It was a delight to see him work the steel. This man liked his profession so much that he had become an artist. The way he worked the steel, the way he handled the hammer, the way he finished his shoes made a deep impression on me.
You could say: "Who cares if the shoe is perfect, the shoe gets underneath the horse anyway! However Martin had a great amount of pride and that made him want to make a beautiful horse shoe. It is always a delight to see someone do something he is really good at. Some time ago I watched a young polo player ride a horse that I myself had given some training. I have to admit that I found it difficult to make sense out of this horse. Whatever I tried, the horse would continue to throw the head about. Then one night this young rider climbed aboard and the horse settled down as if he had touched it with a magic wand. Sudden take-off and quick stops were achieved without hitting the horse with the spurs or pulling on the rein. A certain amount of humility came over me when I saw this brilliant young man ride this "difficult" horse. I hope that he realised how well he can ride.
We dressage riders are a "stuck up" lot, aren't we?! It is difficult to admit that another discipline may have some value too!...and that there are also brilliant riders with the show jumpers or western pleasure riders.
My friend Brett Montgomery told me about the five P's. Apart from performing acupuncture and sports massage, Brett competes in kick boxing. One would say : "What has kick boxing got to do with the "Art" of Dressage? However, I had already learned to appreciate Brett before I knew he competed at kick boxing. At times when I would feel a bit worse for wear because this so and so young horse gave my muscles a bad time, then Brett would give me a massage.
As I was lying on the table I would often talk about the Philosophy of Dressage. Brett would than tell me about the Chinese philosophy that was so much part of him since he became an acupuncturist. It was striking how often we realised that the thinking was the same. I was trying to explain the feeling of ultimate cooperating in the horse and Brett tried to explain the same feeling or philosophy with fighting as background.
At first I could not see the common denominator. Farrying, Polo, Kick boxing and Dressage. But eventually it became clear when I realised we were all practising an ART. Things can only be an art when you have reached near perfection.
Recently Brett became the Australian Champion Kick boxing in his weight class. I mention this because he is really too old. He had hung up his gloves years ago and he had not trained for some time. His golden rule of the five P's gave him the Australian Championships.
In this article I would like to discuss how we can prevent poor performances when we are competing. The first thing we need to do, is to look at how we think about ourselves. To see yourself in your true light will show up your strong and weaker points. It will bring to the foreground fears you may have.
We are our "own" greatest enemy. This poses a problem for us immediately, as we can not dispose of ourselves in a hurry. We often tell ourselves that we "can't" do something. By making this statement we do not have to try and we do not have to go through the agony of failure. Usually we say: "But what if it goes wrong?".
Nothing ever goes wrong! Things may not have worked out the way we had wanted it or envisaged it. It has been a learning experience, though!!!! We found out that things do not work that way. We gained more "experience". Experience is gained from experiments. Not all experiment go the way we wanted or hoped, but they gave us valuable insight in the in's and out's of training.
There is not a teacher in the world that can give you experience. Teachers can tell you about their own experiences. How often have our parents told us not to touch the iron because you will burn yourself........so what do you do? You go and try for yourself to see if it is true! I think we should treat horse riding with the same inquisitive nature and try many different things and see what happens.
In our younger years we were often warned about dangers in this world. Be careful when you cross the street...or you would get killed. Do not climb in that tall tree....or you fall out and you would get killed or worse still you could be crippled. In the end you may well think that if you try anything and if you do not do it right you may get seriously injured.
This fear of the consequences of failure often pursues us in adulthood. I believe, however, that if we never try new things, we will never widen our horizons. So...if it goes wrong, we made a mistake....we learned how "not" to..... and that is all!
Let me give some examples of riders who made it; some against the odds. We all know Klaus Balkenhol, the 53 year old policeman from Dusseldorf, who won the bronze medal in Dressage at the Olympic Games in Barcelona. He is self-taught. There are probably more brilliant dressage "trainers" in Germany than there are dressage riders in Australia. I suppose Klaus could not afford the fee these people are charging.
He could have said to himself: "Poor me.... here I am, an ordinary policeman on ordinary wages with an ordinary police horse that is still doing duty on the streets....I have no money to pay for coaching...my job keeps me from riding at he competitions....and than there are all these young talented riders such as Nicole Uphoff, Isabelle Werth, Monica Theodoresco with money coming out of their ears....so what is the point in trying!!
But he did try! He focussed on the job at hand and made the proper mental and physical preparations! I saw Klaus at Aachen and he received the largest applause of all the riders even though he did not win. I will never forget the experience, because it gave me the biggest goose bumps I have ever experienced. He deserves every bit of this, because he "tried".
Some time ago I was lucky enough to meet Andrew Hoy. Another successful rider at the Olympics in Barcelona. He was finally successful at his fourth Olympic Games and then another three.
Will you add this up, please? That is sixteen years of trying and competing. Any of us mortals give up if we can not master the sitting trot in a week and say to ourselves in exasperation...: "We will never learn this, we have already tried this for a whole week!"
But Andrew kept focussing and he too was rewarded for his dedication with a medal. The reason that I do not mention our other equestrian medalists because I have not spoken with them, not because I do not respect their efforts.
Another person who made deep impression on me was an English lady in her twenties, who is a victim of thalidomide. She was born with no arms. She could have taken the easy way out and let the government look after her. She even had a very legitimate reason , after all she was the victim of a medical experiment. No such thing for her......, she decided she wanted to learn to ride. The reins were tied to stirrups so she was able to steer the horse with her feet. Well, you might say: "Big deal, I too could ride with the reins tied to the stirrups"!...But can you put the saddle and the bridle on with your feet unaided?
Pure focussing on her goal must have got her there. I must not think of the number of times she must have fallen over backwards trying to balance on one foot and lifting the saddle over the horse with the other. Can you imagine that? What about us mortals who need a mounting block to get on an average size horse? Is that not lack of proper preparation on our part to get supple and strong enough to lift our leg high enough to get on.
I suppose that I am saying with these examples that goal setting and our mental preparation are the most important preparations of all. The people in the examples set themselves a goal, than made a decision that they were actually good enough to reach that goal. I think that in competition you have to make the decision that you are "better" than the other riders.
The decision that you are better than the other competitors makes you the winner!
In Australia we so often hear excuses. In case you have not heard them before I shall mention them. "We live in an isolated country". "It costs too much to get there". "We haven't got the horses". "We have not got the riders". "We have not got the trainers". You name it and it has been used as an excuse.
The goal setting and the decision that you are better than the others can also be called motivation. The motivated person sets his goals and will not be deviated from them. Criticism will not effect him/her. You know where you are going. Obstacles in your way can be circumvented or overcome. It was our Franz Mairinger who said that if you only progressed one millimeter toward your goal today.... you are going forward at least! Some of the younger readers may not know Franz. He was a coach who was able to take three Australian Event teams to three medals in three consecutive Olympics in the fifties and early sixties.
Moving forward toward the goal is like going up a very long ladder. You need to take one step at the time you can not skip a step or you may slip and fall back more steps than you skipped. The progress to the top must be done carefully. Once some people were watching one of my lessons in which I was explaining something as basic as a good seat. The rider needed the explanation because she did not know. The comment was passed to me that at school you can not skip grade three, because may miss learning something very basic that will prevent you from learning the more advanced concepts. If I may give an example; If we have not learned the tables of one two and three it will prevent us from gaining an insight in complex ideas such as algebra. Or in horse terms how will we sit out a brilliant extended trot when we have not begun to understand the concept of sitting to the trot at a more sedate tempo. How exactly is the horse moving his body in the trot and what do we need to do to follow this movement of the horse.
If you want to do a Grand Prix test correctly you must practice patience as another one of your preparations and you must not attempt the elusive piaffer or passage before the horse is ready. It will haunt you as a permanently badly executed movement because the horse learned it wrong in first place when he did not have the strength. The horse had not learned the tables of two and three, in other words he had not learned to shorten the trot sufficiently while maintaining the cadence(looseness of the ground) and the freedom of the back before attempting the more difficult movements.
Motivation as tool in horse riding is something that is not as widely used as in most other sports. The most important part of motivation is that we learn to feel good about ourselves. We learn not to be negatively critical of ourselves and our performance. In motivation sessions we can learn about imagery (imagine yourself to do the perfect sitting trot, the perfect canter pirouette) and relaxation techniques.
I speak with some experience about motivation as I have conducted many motivation session with the two vaulters from our centre who attended the World championships in Heilbronn in the early nineteen nineties. As this would be their first experience at World championship level, but above all their very first international experience, it was vital to get them prepared.
We would have twice-weekly session to talk about their fears and worries. (Their biggest worry was that they would let their coach down.) We tried to put the fears in the right perspective such explaining that they can not let the coach down if they try. With all these little matters out of the way we set about our relaxation. I used the same music every time so that in the end the music itself would induce relaxation and create the feeling of well-being. The first thing to do was to create the relaxation in the body and once all the muscles were relaxed I would start on the brain. By actually practising the perfect movement in our minds we created the connection in the nervous system to do it in real life. In our mind we practised being overseas, we practised competing in front of a large knowledgeable crowd. When we actually arrived in Heilbronn we had already been there without seeing it. It made us feel at home already.
The music in relaxation is very important because in the relaxation session you must try to get your heartbeat down to 60 beats per minute. It has been proven that your brain is more open for suggestions when your heart is at this slow rhythm. I used slow baroque music for this.
The result was rather astounding. The marks that they achieved were rather high. Our competitors showed their well-being with their body expression. The word went around that it was clear that the Australians were serious about competing. The final result was in their individual classes 23 placing in a field of 36 competitors. Each country was allowed to send their three best to this competition.
Having seen the incredible suppleness and the strength of the competitors overseas they should have finished last. It was their mentality, their confidence that lifted them so high.
Being a very skeptical man myself I wanted to try this motivation, goal setting and imagery for myself. I could understand that it might work for sports people, because you can see the weight lifters motivate themselves just before the lift...... You can see the downhill speed skier concentrate by himself and practice the downhill course because he does not have much time to think when he skies downhill at the rate of hundred miles an hour.
But can you achieve the impossible? Some time ago I decided that I was unhappy with the income of our business. The best solution seemed to be to double the income and that would solve our problem. Doubling your income in the deepest part of the recession "we had to have" seemed impossible enough for my skeptical mind.
I set about telling everybody what I had in mind. Some of the faces told me clearly they too thought it was impossible. I hang up signs that we were NOT taking part in a recession of any kind. I set about thinking what it would mean to double the takings. I imagined more people in the place. I imagined larger classes, more money to take to the bank, more staff to deal with the larger amount of people. We would have to organise more events to attract people. In essence we were creating a big buzz in the place and I believed sincerely that it could be done.
Sure enough, twelve months later we had reached our goal. This proved to me that:
NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!
Having successes like this you will gain in confidence and conviction. The first proper preparation is your mental attitude. The goal must be set. If you have firm belief that you can achieve the goal you must set a course that will get you to your destination.
Your course to the goal must include exercises for you. You must not only imagine the perfect circle but it must be practised also. Your horse does not share your power of imagination. For him it is muscle-memory. For the horse it is the repetition that makes him totally tune in with you. Of course, also for us imagination is not entirely enough. We too need muscle memory, we need to practice our movements with the horse to perfect them. After all it is a partnership.
After every training session we must make an evaluation. Some people like to call it a Post Mortem. I do not like to use the word post mortem because we only perform this on dead people or animals. Our road to our goal is very much alive, so we evaluate if we are on track. Did everything go to plan in our training session. Exactly what did go right and what went wrong! ....And do not forget to mention the good things too!!!
As I mentioned earlier on we are our own worst enemy. With this I mean that we tend to look only at the worst things we did and criticise ourselves strongly for it. If we were able to look at ourselves from an outside point we would probably see quite a few things that went extremely well, but we concentrate only at the things that went wrong.
It will take some practice to look at the things that went well, the achievements, believe it or not! Often when I say how well a particular exercise went, the student will pick on a tiny detail. They will than proceed to tell me that how wrong that detail was in stead of listening to the compliment! Unless we objectively write down all the good things that happened and all the not so good things we can not make a true evaluation.
The proper preparation concept must be adhered to also in all the training of the horse. We must properly prepare the horse for each of the new exercises. We can not make a proper walk pirouette unless the horse is introduced to the concept of the limiting and pushing outside rein. We can not make a proper canter-pirouette unless we have prepared the horse by teaching him to canter in a very collected way without loosing cadence for a number of strides.
In the following articles many of the slightly more advanced movements will be discussed, how to introduce the horse to them and what preparation is necessary.
Enjoy your ride.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.1 Australia License.
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