By: April Clay
It has sometimes been said in the horse business, “Bad warm up, good show.” This can certainly be true, but as anyone with a little ring experience knows, the opposite can also be true as well as a few other permutations and combinations.
So, instead of betting the odds, there are a few things you can pop into your emergency kit just in case you need to shake off a less-than-ideal warm up.
Planning
The purpose of the warm up is to ready yourself and your horse for competition. It has two main components: physical and mental.
The physical entails the warming up of muscles in both athletes to prepare for the athletic demands. How much and what you do is dependent on many variables. How many classes you have already had, how your horse has been going, what is required of you by this specific course and how your skills have been shining, or not.
Your trainer will, of course, assist you with this aspect, but do come prepared with your own ideas.
The mental warm up, which is less often attended to in a purposeful manner, is about readying the mind for the sharpness, confidence, and clarity that competition asks of us.
In considering this aspect, you want to first obtain some sort of baseline reading on yourself so you know what you’re working with. You can use a four-point check-in.
First, how is your confidence: is it poor, neutral, or solid? Second, how is your energy: high, medium, or low? Third, how is your body: relaxed, tight, or somewhere in-between? And finally, what is your mood like? Are you feeling excited, blue, or just plain content?
Once you quickly determine where you are, then ask yourself: where do I need to go during my warm up? It may be that you notice your tension levels are through the roof, so you want to focus on ways to loosen your body during your warm up. Or you feel flat and unmotivated so you deliberately do things to wake up your mind like reminding yourself of why this ride is important.
Both components are simply too important to leave to chance. If your warm up is to set the stage for what is to come, it should be a well-thought-out plan with a specific goal. That way, your risk of a warm up disaster will diminish considerably.
Perspective
The wonderful news about just about everything unfortunate that happens to us in sport can be looked at from another angle. If you do suffer a warm up glitch, there is always another way to make sense of it.
Trish Mrakawa, a rider and trainer in Calgary, once made good use of this strategy: “One incident I remember was my first young horse at Spruce Meadows. My horse stopped and I fell off at an x-rail. It ran all the way (yes, all the way) back to the barns (a very long way). Not only did I have to walk all the way back and get the horse - I had to turn it around, ride it back in and compete. I won the class. I guess survival got me through. I was already embarrassed, what else could happen?”
So yes, one way to cope is say the worst has happened; now I am free to experience my best. Perspective is an all-important tool. Remember that a bad warm up is just that, a bad warm up. It has no magical predictive powers over what happens next.
This is the gift. The trick is to change your thinking in some way so you don’t carry the baggage with you. You have to check it at the in-gate.
Stop & Regroup
Find a way to interrupt what has just happened, if you can. This is especially helpful with run-on thoughts. You know how you see in all those movies how someone will slap a hysterical person? This is an attempt to get them out of the spin they are in and bring them back out to the present and a new focus.
Now I am not suggesting you inflict any blows on yourself or start trying to get someone to do it for you. However, I did hear one rider say she would routinely slap her crop on her thigh in times she felt she needed to interrupt her negative dialogue.
A physical cue like this can be powerful. Give your head a shake, literally. Others might think you to be a bit off, but it’s your head you need to worry about.
Other forms of “stop measures” involve some form of mental cue. Since you already know a bad warm up does not necessarily equal a bad show, make an effort to erase the potency of the memory.
It’s kind of like recovering from an error in general. Many times you have to quickly find a way to erase the past, and commit to the present. You can do this by erasing the blackboard within your mind. Burn the videotape in your inner movie studio, or edit it with humour and maybe even a light-hearted soundtrack.
You can change your focus with a similar use of key words that help you zero in on your task. Choose several words or short phrases that relate clearly to what you are about to do and let your mind rest on these.
If you are finding your focus being pulled into imagining the worst being translated to the ring, or hearing the chatter in your head, try bringing your focus back out. That is, move from an internal focus to an external one.
It may be that you choose something quite neutral, like the colour of the sky or studying the arc of a tree. Or, you can refocus yourself on your horse. How is he doing? What does he need to feel more confident in the ring? An external focus can be very calming and assist you in changing your mood.
In the final analysis, it doesn’t really matter too much how the bad warm up happened. Sometimes it’s an error in skill, sometimes a lack of confidence, and at other times just plain bad luck. What matters is where it leaves you, and how you recover from the situation.
The good news is, recovery is possible and you can up the odds by having a plan or two at the ready in your emergency tool kit.
Chartered psychologist April Clay is a former A Circuit rider and a member of the Canadian Mental Training Registry. She performs seminars and consultations in equine sports psychology including: Individuals or groups, On the ground or mounted, Email consultations. The perfect topic for your next association meeting! To find out more, call (403) 714-2529, email: april@bodymindmotion.com or visit www.bodymindmotion.com.
