Practicing or Training
Let’s go into the difference in
Practice and Training this month. It is a subject that is so important
and not widely talked about in western horse circles. You will find it
most discussed in Olympic athletes and or athletes on the level of Tiger
Woods, Michael Jordan, etc. Athletes who are far superior in their
sports have a large understanding of these two subjects. It will help
us with our barrel horse if we can separate the two subjects and
understand them both.
When we practice, we repeat an activity
or maneuver with the thought in mind to improve and eventually perfect
that maneuver. We practice correctly and methodically or the maneuver
that we perfect will not be conducive to winning. When we practice, we
hope to eventually become automatic at the maneuver. When we reach
automaticy, our response requires no thinking. Our brain and muscles
are trained to respond immediately. We also want to respond correctly
and automatically if something should go wrong. I want to say here that
lessons are not to take the place of practice. Lessons are simply an
opportunity for a coach to see if you are practicing correctly. I can
tell when my students are practicing at home or just coming to lessons
with no practice in between. I can also tell when they are practicing
correctly or incorrectly.
We can say that practicing has to be
correct and has to be repeated until we have our brain and muscles
trained to be automatic. I have read on coach’s web sites that this
will require about 360 CORRECT responses of a maneuver to reach the
automatic stage. We all know that we cannot practice 360 times a day on
a horse. But, we can go for a few correct responses each day until we
reach the automatic stage. PROGRESS – not PERFECTION is something that
we practice here at the ranch. Just try to improve a little each day
and soon, you have reached the correct automatic stages in your
practice. An example of steady and thoughtful practice is going to your
barrels and training both yourself and your horse to be in the correct
place and in balance together. You will go to point where you want your
horse to pocket, sit down, say whoa, gather your horse, make the turn
that you want, lean forward and leave the barrel. When you repeat this
over and over, your practice will soon result in a horse that will slow
down and gather to make your turns and then speed away. This is very
similar to what your car does when you drive it the same around curves.
You drive to the curve, put on the brake, make the turn, and then press
the gas. Do you have to think about it? No, you have done it so long
that it comes automatically.
Training is another matter. Training
also requires practice, but will involve many things not necessarily
related to the practice that you are doing on the pattern and the
horse. But, the training will enhance and improve everything that you
do in your performance. Why do you think that Tiger Woods disciplines
himself to lift weights, eat correctly, constantly work on his thought
life, and many other areas not related to hitting a ball with a club?
The training that Tiger Woods has done apart from hitting the ball and
practicing for hours has literally brought the game of golf to a new
level. We can bring our own performance to a new level with training.
We need strong abdominal muscles to
ride a horse fast around three barrels. We can achieve strong ab
muscles by training them to be strong. We need to have strong leg
muscles to balance on a fast moving and turning horse. We can achieve
those no other way than by working them. Muscles are only strengthened
by stressing them beyond what they are familiar with. Riding a horse
is not an aerobic exercise. Yes, it works us in more realms than any
other exercise, but it does not improve the blood flow through you body
because it is an anaerobic form of exercise. Eating the kinds of foods
that enhance our body functions will greatly improve our performance.
It has been proven that the proper foods will cause us to think
quicker. Wrong foods can cause our bodies to be sluggish and slow to
respond.
Training our mental game is another
area that requires constant work. We have to train ourselves to
concentrate on the things that we can control. We must bring our
thought life into constant captivity and train our brain. We train our
brain to reject negative thoughts by replacing them with positive and
productive thoughts until thinking
positive has become automatic. This is one area that needs
to be transformed in many of us. You will have a problem in this area
if you were not raised in a positive atmosphere. Don’t let that become
an excuse. Some of us had to re-train our brains just as some horses
have to be re-done because of previous training. You can do this by
constantly being aware of where your thoughts are and correcting them
when they wander off to the negative.
Think of some ways this month that you
can began training in a way that will enhance the practice that you do.
There are some things that we cannot train for, such as riding down the
alley way at your first National Finals Rodeo. There are experiences
that we have to go through to become familiar with a situation that we
don’t encounter every day. BUT, if you practice and train correctly on
your way up, you will find that when you get to the top of your goals,
you will perform automatically and things will fall into place that you
mastered on the way there.