Ep 27: Improvement Isn't About How Hard We Practice

From performanceriders.com this is the Pabry podcast. I'm Nat Foxen and each episode I challenge World equestrian Games top 10 dressage writer Brett Parbury to explain and discuss what I call a Parburyism. That's a pearl of wisdom I've written down over the years of working together in our performance writers programs. Brett doesn't know what today's Pabraism is. Let's get into it.

Brett.

I'm really excited to get stuck into today's topic, which is that improvement isn't about how hard we practice. Okay. Improvement isn't about how hard we practice. What comes to mind for you from that?

I mean, that's a good one. I suppose what comes in mind for me is that practice needs to be done in a certain, like in, in a number of different formats. So for our. I'll use the context of dressage. Of course, there's on the horse, then there's off the horse training, which we can do. We know we've. We do this all the time. You can work on stuff off the horse as well as on the horse. And then there's potentially. Which is also. Can be negative when it comes to horses, is the potentially the overdoing it. You know, you can overdo it by, by trying way too hard or trying for too long on a horse because we're dealing with a live animal who has the potential to switch off and completely be over what we're doing. So I think, yeah, the, the, the fact that, I mean, this relates more to dressage than anything really. But yeah, I think it's more about the targeted, the targeted approach to improving and improve in trying to improve from all different angles.

Yeah. There's so, so many places this discussion could go. I want to tell you a little story about a response to a social media post that we had on the performance writers pages not that long ago. So we, we put up a post that was you talking about how, you know, as writers, we, we always want to train with the Grand Prix in mind and, and think about what it would take to, to be writing at that level. And someone responded, well, what it would take is endless hours of practice, and I don't have that kind of time. And I thought, whoa, okay. I thought, I definitely want to feed that back to you and get your response to that.

Yeah, well, that's not entirely true because that would, I mean, there have been a lot of people get to Grand Prix and do it well on one horse. And the, I suppose looking at that, I mean, I look at it more so in the terms of duration, how long can I spend trying to get better, not how long on any given day. So from my example, like personally speaking, it's all about the duration of time that you are in a certain pursuit, whether it's, you know, we're obviously dressage here, but, but how long you're in it. So what I found in my journey going forward and what when continuing to happen is that you'll understand a concept, you'll understand how you're going to get to happen. It'll, it'll, you'll feel like you're getting it to happen and all of a sudden it'll disappear and you'll feel like you, you've just lost all your feeling and all of your skills and you'll keep going, keep going, maybe go on one or two tangents, but then as you make mistakes, as it comes back to you, it comes back so much clearer and with so much more feel and understanding of what you are working on. So you can only get that through duration in, in something or, or, or trying to get something, not actually in length of time on a day. So hours.

Have you had that experience yourself?

Oh, many times. Well, all the time. You're always growing in this and you're always making mistakes and you know, of course as you get better and better, you make less. But, but in the early days, something would just disappear completely and you'd be like, oh my goodness, I can't, I feel like I don't have any feel for this. And then all of a sudden it would come back and you'd have more feel than you started with. So the duration in something. Now when it comes to duration in something, there are a number of factors there that can be influential. So one is the fact that you don't give up, you know, you just keep going. And we know this is a grind. We know that this, the sport of dressage is a grind. It's a long, slow, steady grind of hard work, self reflection, disappointments. There's all of those things, but at the other end is something really meaningful when you can get through it. So first of all, being able to last yourself, then at the same time educating yourself off the horse, not relying on horse education to, to grow, that you learn off the horse, the sport in which you've chosen, the concepts of how you train your horse through to higher levels and understand those clearly, that's, you know, that's what we speak about in the performance riders program of learning dressage from the top down. Don't Try and learn it from the bottom up, one lesson at a time. Learning it that way, do yourself a favor and engage in off horse training to learn from the top down. But then also comes the horse management and the fact that the horse stays sound, the horse stays sane, the horse stays healthy for a duration of period, so time, so you can, you can then go through the journey of the whole thing. So the hours of practice, probably my view, become more over a period of a length of time rather than on a given day.

And I think also importantly, primarily what you're talking about there is, is the rider's development and practice over time on and off the horse. You know, you're not talking about one horse, those hours and hours and hours going into one horse because as you say, there's, there's a finite time that we have on a daily basis and over the lifetime of the horse that's, that's very finite time, especially if we want them sound and happy and healthy as, as older horses.

Yeah, I mean, I often say to my riders and to the people in the program that, you know, you should really live and breathe this off the horse everywhere. So, you know, for example, walking to and from the stables or walking from the car park to the stables, walk three or four half passes, walk a can of pirouette, walk through something like actually walk it, feel it, put your body in the position that you might have been struggling with or you know, you have, you have to do, you know, walk a shoulder in at home when you're, when you're sitting at the car, at the traffic lights. Like think about transitions and let this, let this whole thing become part of your life. And I mean, it sounds a bit crazy, but you'll find the benefits will come the longer you spend thinking about it. Not necessarily the longer you spend doing it. That's the skill side of it and that's, that will happen through just riding. But the longer you spend thinking and putting your body into the positions that you need them to go into, you know, especially your upper body and, and thinking about where your legs go, you can do that just as well off the horse, which will fast track. I mean, it's not going to completely replace writing, but it will fast track your understanding and get you to the place you want to be quicker than they're not doing it. They're not only relying on the writing lesson to develop your skills and your understanding.

I mean, really what you're talking about there is an extension of visualization, like you're kind of embodying Visualization. And I know visualization is a term that, you know, a lot of us kind of throw around now, but it's such an essential part of almost all top performers, not even sports people, just all top performers, period. I know you used it extensively in your early days to really fast track your development when you switched into dressage from another horse sport. And, and this is like hearing you talk about, you know, walking the half pass to the stables. Like, I know that's something that you're thinking about even now, you know, a couple of decades into doing this sport at the top level. So that's, I think, something. It's one of those things like, let's just not hear the word visualization and go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, what can we do to actually really integrate that into our lives? Because that will really help.

Well, I've got a story for you. So I work with the current number one eventing writer in the world, and I was in the US with him, and I said to him, just before I flew out, he was preparing for Kentucky, the three day Kentucky. And I said, have we, have you walked the tests? Should we walk the tests? And he said to me, I don't. I've never walked the tests. I said, well, we're about to start. So down into the basement we went and we walked through the way that I would walk through those tests, the dressage tests that he had to do, the way I would walk through them, and the things that I would think about in every corner and short side and set up and halfway through the movement, thinking of the next thing and all these things. I was really pleasantly surprised because I flew home before the. The actual event, really pleasantly surprised to watch the test come through online and watch every single thing we practiced in the basement happening. And that resulted in a very good result at Kentucky. And I think there's an enormous. There's enormous power in that, like putting yourself there mentally. I mean, the horses, they just respond to us. And I mean, I think everybody listening to this podcast can probably think of an incident where they thought something and the horse did it. Whether they were on the horse or whatever. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but there is. I know myself. There's definitely times when I've thought something and I've been playing around with this thought about a half halt or thought something, and the horse responds, and I'm like, wow, this horse is way more tuned into me than I'm giving them credit for. So if you can put the right thoughts in your mind, and then of course, match that with practiced body control and practice body language that you practice off the horse. There's. You're giving yourself the best chance. And I mean, what we're talking about here is how do I, or how do we give ourselves the best chance to be as good as we can be? And today's topic is, of course, not working harder, working smarter. And, and this is, I think, a really important skill for people to practice and try and do. And you'll feel funny. I mean, you'll feel funny when you first do it, but do it in a private spot and just continue to do it and it'll feel again. Anything that you work on mentally is a bit blurry to start and you don't have to quite the focus and the whole things. But your mind is a muscle. It'll get stronger the more you develop it and you'll find that you'll be able basically walk through anything that you need to improve and feel like you know you can do it.

Just a quick message from us. If any of the ideas discussed today resonate with you and you'd love to dive deeper, head over to performanceriders.com there's a bunch of free content for you. And there's loads of opportunities as well to work with us by enrolling in one of the our training or Mentoring Programs, performancewriters.com I want to touch on a couple of things here, and we are talking about that topic that improvement isn't about how hard you practice. One of my very favorite books is called Grit by Angela Duckworth. And she talks about what she calls deliberate practice. And this is this sort of chunking down of big things and working on, as we in the program, in our programs call it, ingredients, you know, working on ingredients. And I think, let's talk about this, this topic and let's talk about the half pass, right? Because I think, you know, we see it time and time again from writers. They want to improve the half pass. So they're like practicing the half pass. More half pass, more half pass, harder, faster, grit the teeth, grumble about it, push, pull, da, da, da, da. Drill the half past, drill the half pass. That's practicing hard, right? But what we like to do in the program is that idea of deliberate practice. Chunk it down, be smart about it, like you're saying, and work on the ingredients. Do you want to talk to that a little bit?

Yeah. You know, it's funny just listening as you're saying that, like the fact, I mean, we're trying to be athletes. I Mean, we are engaging in a sport overall, and we're trying to be as good athletes as we can. And we're used to, from when we're kids, you know, if we're doing some sort of sport, you know, working harder, get. Do. Work harder, work harder, do more. And with horses, the whole goal is to do less.

Right.

It's kind of the, the whole point of dressage is to. Is to have the horses doing more and us doing less. And that's where the skills, the absolute skills, like so, so you don't need to be sweating or puffing or working hard to develop skills. You just need to know which skills you need and then which muscles you're going to use in which order and then which time to use them. Right. So that's, that's the key because, I mean, the hardest part about dressage is actually doing nothing. That's, that's the hardest part. It's getting the horse to do what you want them to do and then do. Do the minimum. The minimum. So the horse has some relief of this pressure. So understanding, like accurately, accurately, where the aids are meant to be on, which aids understanding, then feeling the horse to me, in order to put the aids on and then the moments to let the pressure off, all those things can be visualized and worked on. Off the horse. Yeah.

And then even on the horse. Like, if we think about that half pass example, you know, when you work with students on, say, a half pass. I don't hear you really talking about a half pass. I hear you talking about shoulder control and half hole and all these other ingredients. And you're working, you're working smarter on those ingredients rather than practicing harder and longer on trying to get the final result.

That's right. So, you know, there's something I want to come back to. There is deliberate practice. But first of all, I'll just finish on this. The, the, the fact that, yes, all dressage movements are a layering, a layering of very simple aids that come together to produce a different body position or a different movement in dressage, when, when ride, when we riders put them on, we can do them individually, fine. But when we start putting them on, we put one on, but we forget we've got the other one on. Like we've, you know, it's developing this awareness of our whole body, and that's where that whole sort of clashing, let's call it evades, starts to happen. Because we're very good at thinking about one thing, but thinking about multiple things and feeling the horse at the same time is quite difficult. So having an understanding and really understanding what are the simple basic ingredients, if you want to call it that, that make up, let's call it a half pass. You know, you just, you said it. A half pass. What are the ingredients? Flexion bend, horses round on the bit. Then there's shoulder control, highly control, all done with separately aids. Mod I add, then the horse is in front of my leg and in my rhythm. And all of those things have an individual meaning. And when they come together, they still have an individual meaning, but they, they come together to produce a half pass. Now, as we said before, there's half passes and there's half passes. There's half passes that you do just to get through it and there's half passes that do that becomes bigger, better the more you practice, the more you develop it. But what I was going to circle back onto was the, what you said there about deliberate practice. Now I think if you were to ask most dressage riders, they would say they are doing deliberate practice because they're riding every day very diligently. Like dressage people are some of the most committed and intelligent people in, in horses, in, in the equine sport. And I think you'd find that they are doing what they consider to be deliberate practice. The one thing I would remind most dressage people, including myself, is we can't lose the sight of what dressage is supposed to be. It's, it's supposed to be harmonious, better for the horse. The longer we do it, you know, the horse ends up a better version of itself. It's supposed to be pressure and release. Not all pressure, not all release. Pressure and release. Where the release happens when we reward and then the horse is doing what we want and the pressure is when we're trying to get a response from the horse to get them to do what we want. So the timing involved with pressure and release and then the length of time or the noticing, excuse me, the noticing of the horse. What part of this, of these aids are they not getting? You know, there's no point me doing 20 trot canter transitions if my horse keeps putting its head near. Every time I do a trochanter transition, I'm best to come back to walk or halt and deal with this, this issue, you know, and say, okay, when I, when I take contact, I need you to yield from my reins and draw. I don't need you to, to keep shoving your head in the air. I need you to learn that when you feel the connection, you're You're. You're to yield to the connection and draw forward to the contact and let go of your back. And. And I think it's then giving the horse time to learn that in a halt or in a walk or whatever it might be, and bringing it back to the truck canter and slowing things down so the horse can. And that's what you talk about, deliberate practice.

Yeah.

Deliberately showing the horse all of the bits that you need them to know individually and then start bringing them together, and as soon as they give you the signs they're not getting one of them, just slow it all down, go back, show them again, and you'll find that that deliberate practice also helps us get better skills. It gets them to understand better. And you do get a lot further with that mindset.

I think you've nailed that example, you know, because that's a clear difference between the hard, hard work. Hard practice is trot can. Trot can it. Keep doing it. Keep doing the trot canner. And I think, you know, what I'm hearing here is all we're doing with that is training the horse to make more mistakes, whereas the deliberate practice or smart practice or intentional practice, whatever you want to call it, is just taking a second to go. Hang on a minute. Is it the trot? Can a transition? That's the core of the problem here? Or is, can I break it down into something more specific to work on and then plug that back into whatever I'm trying to do? In this case, the trot can. To transition. I think it's. It's a slightly different approach to our training. You know, we're all. All of us, you, me, everyone, we're always trying to get better at this every single day. And I think this is a slight mindset, Mindset shift that would be really helpful for us that we. We turn away a little bit from harder, more, you know, louder, da, da, da. And be a little bit more clever about it. Take a second to think and use our visualization, use all those, you know, supposedly intelligent things that we bring to the table in training and. Yeah, look at it a slightly different way.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And like you said, like, you know, we're supposed to be the more intelligent of the species here, especially when it comes to doing dressage. At least we have an idea of what we're trying to achieve, but we don't actually do it that intelligently. And I think, you know, we've got to be smarter about this and think about it, especially if we do want to Achieve harmony and horses that understand and grow themselves through the sport and get, and, and get better the longer they go. Really think about our AIDS and think about our understanding of, of the AIDS and you. @ the end of the day, we don't know what we don't know. So, so when I see writers sometimes and I coach a lot, as you know, and I'll say, okay, why do you do that? And I get, you know, the reason, and I'm like, but think about this. That is then clashing with this and this and this and that rider just goes ping. Like a light bulb goes off. And the, the thing there is, and this is why I'm sort of so passionate about this, is I'd love that light bulb to go off with more riders. But you don't need to be sitting on the horse for the light bulb to go off. Yeah, you can actually be sitting, learning in a car like a podcast. Same as this. That to get this information, you don't need to be putting your horse through this for the light bulb to go off. And because it is always a review on ourselves, like, let's review what we're doing. The horse will be the horse. How do I review what I'm doing first? Because that's the only thing I can control. And then I'll look at other things, controlling other things. But how do I review what I'm doing? And that's where I'm why I'm so passionate to get it out there. Because I know I spend an enormous amount of my time doing that, always thinking, always trying to get better, making lots of mistakes as everyone else does. But yeah, that's just a passionate thing. And I think you'll find that a lot of, let's call it high performers. And that's not a, I don't mean a high performer in the sense of successful. I mean someone who's wired as a high performer. Meaning. And I don't care if someone can't even trot, if they're wired as a high performer, they will progress quicker through the sport. And someone who's wired in that way, they, they do think about stuff in all different facets and they are hungry to get better. And I'd like to just make other people aware of that because you never know when someone's going to get a spark. There's a spark that might just light someone up to become a high performer. And as we always say, you know, the horses will be the beneficiary of that. So that's, that's the important Part, I think and why I'm so passionate about pushing this stuff because I want the horses to benefit and I want the, I want dressage to be what makes the horse's life better in all ways. You know, mentally, physically, long, healthy life where they're cared for by somebody which is better for horses in the long run.

You know what, I'll end with this little story. You're gonna love this. So in our gold program, which is a membership we run in performance riders. There's a rider named Lorraine. Shout out to Lorraine, hello. And the other day we had the Australian Olympian Will Matthews as our guest coach. Will Matthew, our guest coach on, on the program. And anyway, so Lorraine was at the session live, right Then she listened to the session again on the way to work the next day and she posted in our group, these are all the things I got out of this session. She had like 25 points. And I said, wow, that's amazing, Lorraine. She said, don't worry, I haven't finished. I'm listening to it again. But on the way home from work. So she listened to it live. Then on the way to work, the replay, then on the way home from work again, the replay. And I think that is exactly the high performer that you're referring to, Brett, that type of thinking.

Absolutely, absolutely. Like the itch you can't scratch the person who's just so into it. And that doesn't mean you have to be a one dimensional person either. Like I know Lorraine, she's very accomplished professional in a professional career and manages to squeeze a lot in but uses her time wisely and that name a number of people like that in the program. Just using those minutes and scrap minutes and minutes that you don't really do other things to think about this and get better. Like I say, you don't have to be then this one dimensional crazy person who only thinks about dressage. That's not it. It's using the minutes well so that you can improve and then have capacity and space for other things in your life.

Yeah, exactly. Awesome chat. Always love getting this little boost of inspiration from these episodes and this food for food for thought. So thank you very much, Brett.

Pleasure. Thank you.