BOOK REVIEW AND GIVE AWAY (Wordlwide)! Perfect Mind: Perfect Ride. Sport Psychology for Successful Riding by Inga Wolframm

How do you become a successsful rider? I’ve been asked this question many times and it’s never easy to come up with an answer. The rider, the horse, the training, the facilities, the support team – eventually all these elements need to come together to form a whole.

And yet, I’m convinced that it all starts with the rider. […]

I believe that, as riders, we’ll need to work on ourselves, every second of every day. Being patient and remaining calm and quiet at all times, regardless of whether we’re going for a hack around the block or are about to perform at a major competition, whether we’re at the top of our game or things aren’t working out quite the way we’d hoped. Anyone who wants to get to the top of their chosen discipline will have to deal with the inevitable highs and lows. They are all part of the experience: one day you’ll win an event and the next you’ll hit the deck. […]

Foreword by Mary King, Olympic three-day eventer

The above is a fragment of the Foreword by Mary King to Inga Wolframm’s brilliantly readable,  educational and engaging new book Perfect Mind” Perfect Ride.

When I first heard about this book I thought it was going to be a fairly dry and perhaps scientific material but I couldn’t be further from my assumptions. Packed with real life anecdotes and examples of experiences of top riders and amateurs alike, this book makes sports psychology enjoyably digestible and totally makes you feel like you want to try the stuff out rather than survive through a painful lecture!

Deep down, we all know that confidence makes or breaks our pleasure from riding, training and competing. The same goes for our horses. Shy, distrusting, worried and spooky horse is not one most riders would feel connected with and happy on. Yet, as riders, we could sometimes be described with exact same adjectives…

Inga’s book gives you a great tool, a starting point to sort your own attitude, develop mental skills that train your mind.

Having said all the above, the content is not just or all about nerves control as such. It is also an insight into elements of a roadmap to essential mental qualities that any rider needs: commitment, focus, ability to deal with adversity, controlling moods, constructive approach to analysing performances.

Through conversational style, Inga sparks your interest in various concepts rather than simply telling you about them, which I personally found very captivating.

Imagery. It’s all about seeing yourself perform, right?

Wrong. Or at least, not quite right.

Remember the descriptionists’ explanation for why imagery works? It is our language that makes an experience come to life. But words don’t merely paint a picture. They also describe how something might sound, smell and taste. Most importantly though, the words used during imagery should describe how an experience might feel.

What does it feel like as your horse engages his hind quarters? What does it feel like when he is soft in the contact? What do ‘keeping a rhythm’ or ‘collection’ feel like? […]

The book will also help those who always strive for perfection not just in their riding but also in other aspects of life – for me, it helped me with understanding and easing off pressure I put on myself to deliver best possible lessons and blaming myself if the rider isn’t doing as well as I think they should. There is a fine line between healthy desire for excellence and unhealthy expectations that don’t deal a hand of responsibility evenly.

Physical fitness isn’t much without mental fitness. ‘Perfect Mind: Perfect Ride’ is like a jolly, personal mental trainer with whom you will get to know yourself in ways you perhaps did not consider before…a trainer who will take you for a fascinating session in understanding that confidence is not something you have or don’t have, it’s something you work on every day.

AND THERE IS MORE 🙂 Inga and her publisher – Quiller Publishing – has kindly sent me a copy of the book and I would love to offer it as a Give Away. If you feel you would benefit from reading ‘Perfect Mind: Perfect Ride’ here is how to snap it! 🙂 

1) Share this blog post either by Re-blogging it, sharing on Twitter or Facebook or by emailing link to it to your friends.

2) Email me at aspire@outlook.com with a few sentences about why you would like this book and mention how you shared the post.

The deadline is 16th July 2015, 10pm UK time and I will email the lucky winner to ask for address and contact details by Monday 20th July.

Look forward to hearing from you and letting the book fly to someone who will make a great use of it 🙂

If you already read it, please share your thoughts in the comments!

Wiola

Dr Inga Wolframm on Being Great…

Bella (www.bellagiles-smith.co.uk) and Stuart Boyle’s Rudy during Aspire training session on 13th April 2014. Photo credit: Pacific Vidaurri

What makes for a truly great rider?

Amazing skill, a great horse, lots of money and a trainer at your beck and call? Undoubtedly any one of those attributes would be exceedingly helpful to any equestrian, never mind a great one. Yet is it enough? Or is it even what is most important in the quest to being truly successful?

Upon closer examination of what makes top performers, be that riders, athletes, musicians or business people, so very good at what they do, we soon notice that they all share a number of attitudes, character traits and mental skills absolutely essential to success. First of all, every single top performer will have shown incredible levels of commitment to their chosen field. They will have lived and breathed whatever it was, sometimes to the detriment of other areas of their lives. But more often than not, they wouldn’t even have said that they had missed out on anything – quite simply because they wouldn’t have felt that they had! But that kind of commitment doesn’t come out of nowhere. It has to be fed by real passion, by the kind of fuel that keeps the fire burning even when things get tough! And tough they will get! Being exceptional and exceptionally committed, at the expense of what society considers a “normal” lifestyle, usually causes quite a few raised eyebrows, and more often than not a fair share of jealousy or even hostility.

This is where the concepts of single-mindedness and mental toughness come in.

Single-mindedness, much like commitment, means being prepared to put the blinkers on, and to just keep on going, no matter what. And mental toughness? Mental toughness will make sure those exceptional individuals pick themselves back up after they have been knocked down, trodden on and left to flounder. Mental toughness is the coat that keeps them warm in the chill of the headwind, and nice and cool under the scorching lights of scrutiny.

All these traits fit together like puzzle pieces to form the backdrop to another layer essential to top performance: solid mental skills! Being in control, confident in one’s own abilities and knowing precisely what to do and when to do it – extremely important in any type of sport. But even more so in equestrian sports. Horses are, after all, highly sensitive flight animals. That means that they’ll react first and ask questions, well, never… In essence, that also means that every time riders get on their horses, they need to be fully committed,aware and “in the moment”, they need to be in control of their bodies, their thoughts and their emotions, just to make sure that whatever they communicate is precisely what they had aimed to do in the first place.

And the good news is… the traits and skills described above can be achieved by anyone. All it requires is the right kind of mindset and the willingness to put just a little bit of effort into it. But that’s the beauty of dealing with equestrians – at least that is one trait that just about every single rider already has in bucket loads: a real sense of commitment – to their horses and to their sport!

So, really, what are you waiting for?!

Inga Wolframm is a writer, scientist and sport psychologist focusing on equestrian sports. Read more about Inga HERE. 

The Day I got Hit by a Train (oh, sorry – the day I tried Yoga for the first time!)

Some time ago I got given a voucher for yoga sessions. Having done Pilates and various exercise programmes over the years I didn’t think this would be much different but I have always wanted to give it a go. The reason for this and for my general interest in various posture, body awareness and breathing exercises in more depth is to understand what can be a good, sustainable, complimentary exercise routine for an ambitious, amateur rider.

What I mean by sustainable is that it brings clear improvement to the rider’s performance (i.e. feel, body control, posture control, balance control) in such a way that the rider is encouraged to stick to the regime.

There are riders using yoga on horseback (not quite the thing I was after) and there are also numerous books about Pilates and Yoga for riders out there. From my own experience, Pilates can and does help with riding but not everybody is keen on it. Some of my riders do yoga and I wanted to know the difference first hand. Since I had the voucher I finally got organised and booked my first Yoga session.

Well, let me tell you, this thing is BRUTAL 😀

It started with a lovely ambient of candle lights and relaxing scents all warmed by wooden interiors and barefoot, quiet people. And then, my body got ripped apart. In fact, it’s a couple of hours since my session now and I still feel most muscles in my body as if I had done some serious workout or ridden a few horses more than I am used to. It’s quite amusing and surprising. I feel no localised pain, just a low grade muscular tiredness that washes off all over me and makes me feel rather good!

My class was a beginner one and the things I noticed brought me most difficulties were positions requiring a lot of hip flexibility. I am noting this down because pelvis flexibility as well as lower back stability is what we need as riders.

I liked the overall theme of very precise positioning, emphasis on neutral spine, straightness, symmetry and deep muscular engagement without force. My favourite exercise was an odd floating one (the crow? – see image below) when you pretty much lift yourself off the floor on your hands with your knees on your elbows.