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Two years of research; A look at the mental requirements of Show Jumpers in Training Part One

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 concentrate on being mentally better for 1% of the time we compete, we must roll with the majority’

This emphasis on creating better mental processes for training relates to the understanding that Showjumping athletes spend up to eight hours a day in the saddle when training yet their competitive ride normally lasts shorter than 3 minutes. Improving training quality through performance coaching was associated with improved competitive success, satisfaction and progression in the sport.

Learning to be Present 

Athletes articulated feeling the need to be switched on ‘all day everyday’. Equestrian sport was likened to an ‘all consuming way of life’ and recognition was given to demands the sport places on all aspects of one’s life, 
‘Sometimes you don’t get time to process anything...you have a bad ride on a horse and then you get on the next one still holding all that emotion. Same thing goes for family, you get off a bad horse and go in for dinner, while you’re with your wife you’re still angry at the horse’.

Participants referred to this important ability to switch focus from one horse to the next, without the results of the last horse influencing the relationship. Linked to improved focus and concentration participant 3 articulated this experience;

‘You aren’t just on your horse riding it, you are actually being with it, accepting what is happening and being in the moment. A lot of the time I’m on a tight schedule and sometimes I rush to ride. I was only half paying attention ...we did a lot of work on doing versus being...then I began to lock in better to the moment and stop worrying about the place I had to be next and actually that made a big difference to my training quality.’

The perceived importance of the rider’s ability to switch focus from one horse to the next utilising mindfulness techniques to prevent carrying past or future emotions with them was a consistent trend. In describing this phenomenon, participants described being at one with the horse, focusing only on what presents in the current moment using various techniques associated with Coaching sighted largely as breathing, visualisation and finding calmness to create a human-horse bond. This harmonisation of the human and horse is well documented in the equine performance related literature and has been conceptualised through feelings of intimacy, partnership and physicality which combine to create an ontological rush otherwise described as being at one with your horse. 

Participants also cited mindfulness as a method of regaining control of the situation, emphasised not as taking control of the horse, but rather one’s mind. Family demands, bad results, poorly behaved horses and business stressors were referred to as causing mental distraction and affecting the harmonisation of horse and rider. Participants associated periods of inhibited performance with over-thinking, distraction and poor execution of normally attainable tasks. Riders emphasised mindfulness as a psychological skill associated with taking control of their mind, regardless of everything else occurring around them,

‘there is so much going on all the time, running from place to place and looking after people, it’s important to learn mental skills that will help you take control of that’.

This is important for finding optimal performance states, the exploration of how individual emotional or mood states can be recognised, altered and optimised for optimum performance. Those riders unable to process information correctly due to emotional distraction are unlikely to react correctly to the various responses given by the horse leading to a decrement in performance.


Equestrian sport is known to be particularly demanding on international level athletes taking into consideration the necessity of the sport to be practiced nearly seven days per week and also to be revenue generating. The ability to fit more rides into a day tends to correspond to increased income, therefore encouraging athletes to accept the maximum amount of work possible. Down time is rarely attainable during the on season which may shed some light on the cited importance of refocusing and controlling one’s mind during daily training. 

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