Confidence Comes From a Body that’s “Got You”

Confidence is a big topic, and it can have many factors affecting it.

I’m not going to talk about the deep psychological stuff here,  I’m want to talk about how having a body that feels secure and strong in the saddle can affect your confidence.

If you feel like you’re wobbling around not really in control of your limbs that’s not going to fill you with confidence is it. 

If your core feels strong and your body feels like it’s reacting to your horse underneath you that will make you feel like you’re in control of the situation.

If you’ve trained your body to be stable whilst absorbing the movement of the horse, yet remain soft enough to move freely with it when the inevitable spook, buck or trip happens; you’re going to absorb and go with that too rather than execute an unplanned dismount. It’s a pretty cool feeling to sit a decent buck or a spook and barely move out of the saddle; not even the slightest hint that you were going to exit stage left. 

If you feel that you may be on a spooky horse but your body has “got you” that’s one aspect of your nerves taken away. That feeling of “I might fall off” doesn’t seem so real anymore as you’ve trained your body to cope and react to the unexpected.

How do you train your body to react and stay with the spooks and the bucks?

It starts with the basics as always. A body that is comfortable and stable using the big muscle groups during exercises such as Squats, Deadlift and Rows, then able to isolate stability during movement in core work such as Deadbugs or doing movements on an unstable surface such as wobble boards or hedgehog pods. Make it functional first, then you can add in the reaction training starting small with things like Kettlebell swings and building up to maybe reaction based games or Olympic lifting depending on what you’re into. 

As we always say- riding is a sport and that therefore makes the rider as much of an athlete as the horse. In all other sports the athletes not only train in their sport they also spend time in the gym working on their bodies as a whole; so maybe it’s time you started training like an athlete and see your confidence soar!

Are you better than you think you are?

So much of what we do with our horses relates to how we feel about ourselves. 

If we don’t believe we are capable of achieving more or of learning new skills we may never push ourselves to try. 

A feeling I often see in my clients is “people like me don’t do that….” People like who? Those at the pinnacle of the sport are still only human they’ve just put more hours into their craft than us. 

So many of us don’t feel good enough.

That’s what I like to unravel in the gym. 

Those people who can’t learn new skills suddenly taking on new exercises in the gym as we’ve broken them down into manageable steps and all of a sudden it falls into place. 

People who swear they aren’t coordinated are suddenly doing tricky left hand right leg things. Ladies who didn’t lift weights are lifting significant weights because we started small. 

This new found confidence starts to transfer to other areas. Using the same approach of breaking things down into smaller steps new skills become achievable. 

If you feel like rider fitness isn’t for you yet you feel like your riding isn’t improving maybe it’s just a matter of starting smaller and breaking down the steps. 

Working with an expert can help so if you want to get working on your self improvement today let me know! 

Easy and Hard days

I posted last week that for lent instead of giving up something i would commit to exercising every day. 

What’s important to remember though is not every workout needs to be go hard or go home. In fact none of them have to be if that’s not your style.

My goal of fitness is to be an all rounder. To have a functional, adaptable body, with good motor control and awareness that can cope with the demands I place on it. That may be riding, yard work, dog agility or something fun I’ve never tried before. 

That doesn’t come from one set of specific exercises. 

So in my 7 day exercise plan there will be a combination of strength, cardio, stretching, high intensity, low intensity, high impact and low impact activities that give my body the chance to challenge itself but also not overload itself. 

For me that includes X Trainer as my high intensity but fairly low impact cardio. A boxing class as high impact cardio; with a little bit of strength work in there too as there is always a circuit at the end. 

A strength workout to focus purely on moving under load for stability gains. 

A yoga workout for mobility and also mindfulness in connecting with my body and engaging in breath work.

I just added in swimming as another low impact cardio workout. 

Then in between I’ll do what i feel my body and brain needs on the day. So if I feel like jumping on the X Trainer I will, but as was Tuesday I did a 30 minute dance workout on YouTube but it could also have been a Pilates session, another strength workout or whatever I fancy based on how my brain and body feels that day. 

This mix means I can balance hard days and easy days which are essentially rest days but my body really does feel better if I move at least a little bit every day. 

If you prefer to train really hard and heavy then full rest days may be more appropriate for you with perhaps some gentle mobility work to keep you limber. It’s important to listen to your body, maybe go through some trial and error to find what makes you feel at your best. 

Whatever your preferred training style just ask yourself if it fits your goals and if it makes your body feel good and you won’t go far wrong.