Poppy Blandford

With the Nations Cup finals taking place in Barcelona this week, it seems like a good time to share my research findings on showjumping athletes mental requirements at the top of the sport. Earlier this year I submitted two years of research to UCC documenting my findings from interviewing and observing the athletes competing at 1.50m level and above. I examined the role of a Performance Psychology Coach within the sport highlighting four key areas, training quality, competitive success, personal well being and future generations. Over the coming fortnight, I will be sharing snippets from  this project and providing an insight into the mental requirements demanded by our modern sport. Improving Training Quality  The importance of improving training quality was acknowledged as a common theme during this research, ‘ if you are not willing to try new ways of making yourself train better, forget it. We spend 99% of our time training horses, we cannot just concentrat...

‘’I know of no more encouraging fact that the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavour. ‘’ I recently talked at a Marketing event in Dublin and was surprised by the level of engagement with my talk. In our fast past corporate environments, self management and self reflection seem more relevant than ever.  I aimed to inspire an understanding of how the resource of self can be the solution.  SECTION 1:  Its time to start thinking about what you are actually doing and where you are actually going. We spend a lot of time running on the corporate treadmill and sometimes we are running so fast that personally we have no idea where we are trying to end up. Its important to occasionally step off the machine and reassess if 1) you are going in a direction you actually want to go and 2) if you are feeling in control of your progress.  The Social Paradigm - Understanding the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, our ch...

This week I partnered with The Irish Field to take a look how we train for Pressure. An interesting look at the difference between USA and Irish training culture and some useful tips to practice at home. The full Article can be read below. ​ ​ S M L XL Training to perform or just training? I’m writing this time from the Winter Equestrian Festival in Florida, a place like no other to immerse yourself in all forms of equestrian sport and a place like no other to learn as much at the ring side as on a horse. In fact, many riders like Darragh Kenny or Conor Swail mention they enjoy basing here for a few months to have the chance to watch and learn from other riders at home and at competition. What makes this show so unique is the visibility of the rider’s routines and preparations for competition over an extended time period. It’s an insight we rarely catch a sight of at other five star venues and it’s here we can learn more about our own systems, training approaches and atti...

  This week I worked together with the Ireland's dedicated equine newspaper, 'The Irish Field' to take a look at how our mind set can affect our future. http://www.theirishfield.ie/horse-sense-the-power-of-mindset-on-performance-226341/  Equine Sport is a very dynamic and changeable industry and it can become easy to focus on what's wrong instead of what we can make right. I've posted the article below in case you cant access the online version. Are we looking in the right place? Now that the excitement of the Olympics has well and truly passed there's a sense of familiar normality restored to our days. We shift our hopes to our young horses in Lanaken while our pony and young riders return back to school longing for more days, more chances, day dreaming of their own gold medal.  For those of us living the daily equestrian life we revert back to our old frustrations of poor facilities and bad weather, slipping easily back to our ro...

When McLain Ward left the arena after winning the World Cup Final of Showjumping and exclaimed that learning to conquer his mind through mental coaching was key to his performance, it hit the head lines. The world of sports is changing, competitions are becoming more technical and pressures are becoming greater. The taboo of ‘mental coaching’ has slowly started to dwindle and athletes, including equestrians are starting to reap the rewards of mastering their minds. So where does mental coaching fit with equestrian sport and what is it? Mental Performance Coaching is recognized as an effective method of increasing human performance and optimizing personal effectiveness.  Coaching psychology, as opposed to a sports Coaching, is based in scientifically valid theory.  The concept was started by a famous tennis player, Tim Gallwey who began to revolutionize the term ‘Coaching’ by coming to realize that for many athletes, it was not that they didn’t...