Ep. 33 On mental rehearsal experiments, and how MR is best led by passion, but can become torture.

I need to give an extra little bit of introduction to podcasts 31, 32, 33 and 34. Within these podcasts I start to explain mental rehearsal and invite you to do some mental rehearsals, understanding how this skill builds, how it works, and building up to some substantial mental rehearsals of your riding by podcast 34. Essentially, I'm inviting you to do some structured daydreams, but realise that daydreaming whilst driving or operating any other machinery is not sensible and is potentially dangerous. These exercises are fascinating and they can be tremendously helpful, but please use you owe it to yourself to do them in a safe, sensible, quiet environment so that you can give 100% of your attention as you're doing them and so you do not expose yourself or anybody else to danger. Please take me seriously on this and please really enjoy learning about the wonderful skill of mental rehearsal. Hello, it's Mary Wandlis here. Following our series of podcasts, which will continue and which I know a lot of people have enjoyed, I'm proposing a series of webinars beginning in late November, four Before Christmas and four After Christmas, happening weekly and giving me the opportunity to show you some of the facets I haven't been able to show you through anything other than my words during the the podcasts. This will enable me both to use PowerPoint and to be on camera explaining things to you, at times using a flip chart and at times using our riding simulator at Oberdale Equestrian Centre and one of my colleagues on that simulator. I think I can add significantly to your understanding and your skills by doing this, and we have demonstrated in many different ways that that people really can improve their riding skills over the Internet. I promise to be interesting and fun and slightly different and to give you very practical viewpoints both on learning and skill development and on showing you the skills that it really is you need to develop. So it may be that we're facing a rather long end and dreary and possibly isolated winter, but there might be a little possibility of some wonderland here between you and your horse as you discover skills that really can make a difference to your riding, your relationship with your horse and how the interaction between the pair of you pans out. So please join me on this. You will find joining information on maryonelist Shop webinars and I would love to see you, albeit on the other side of the camera, in a way that enables you to personally ask me questions and personally benefit from seeing as well as hearing. I hope to see you there. Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 33 where we continue our discussion of mental rehearsal. And I'd like to start by telling you some of the research experiments that have been done. One involved two groups of students who were new to playing the piano and who learnt a sequence of notes. One group then practiced two hours a day and one sat by the keyboard and did mental practice for two hours. One with the instruction to feel it and hear it. Their brains were scanned on the first days and three days later and the mental practice group showed the same brain changes and the same ability to send enhanced motor signals as the real practice group. By the fifth day and another scan, the the actual practice group were ahead. But when the mental practice group were given a two hour session of actual practice, their overall performance improved to the same level as the physical practice group. In other words, minimal physical practice was needed to gain the same skill and the same neurological changes. Another study shows how imagining using muscles strengthens them. So this involved an actual exercise of a finger muscle. And one group did this 15 times at maximum contraction with a 15 second rest between each contraction. And they did this from Monday to Friday, every day for four weeks. And it resulted in a 30% increase in muscle strength. The other group, which did imaginary practice or mental rehearsal, did in their mind 15 maximum contractions with 20 seconds rest between. And they had an imagined voice in their head shouting harder, harder. Which I wouldn't recommend if you were riding. Their muscle strength increased by 22%. Essentially the same basic practice and the same basic neurological changes were happening in their nervous system and brain. These experiments show that imagination and action are highly integrated. We know that the faster you can do something, the faster you can imagine doing it. That was clear from the imagination of signing your name with your dominant and your non dominant hand. The speed with which we imagine something or which we can imagine something is probably constrained by the firing of neurons within our brain as they organize that motor program. And let's face it, we've had minimal practice of signing our name with our non dominant hand. And actually in mental rehearsal, you do have the option to slow something down in your mind to get you to begin to get skill there before you catch up with real speed. So the faster you can imagine doing something, the faster you can actually do it. If you can only imagine it slowly, it's because you can only do it slowly because of those inefficient neuronal firing programs. Here's another experiment which involved darts. 75 students were divided into groups and this was an eight week experiment. On the first day, all of the students threw 50 darts. Group one had no practice, real or mental, and they returned in eight weeks to throw 50 darts. Group two threw 50 darts a day and kept track of their scores. Groups 3, 4 and 5 did actual practice and imaginary practice on alternate days with different imaginary protocols. Now, I haven't been able to get to the bottom of what those were, but I think they would have involved seeing yourself doing it, seeing what you'd see out of your own eyes and really emphasising feeling yourself doing it. So after eight weeks, when everybody came back together to throw 50 darts, the control group, who'd done nothing, showed no improve. The actual practice group improved by 67 points and the mental training groups improved by 101 points. 141 points and 165 points. That, to my mind, is phenomenal and a huge endorsement of mental rehearsal. I've told you some great stories here about mental rehearsal, but here's a story that in many ways is not so great. This was told to me by a friend in Australia who used to organise my clinics in the Melbourne area. And her daughter was doing well, show jumping and was on the young rider squad for their state. And the mother was attending a clinic with a load of young people. And there was a situation in which one rider had a fall in which the horse fell, she fell, the jump crashed to the ground. It was a significant fall. The kid got up unharmed, the horse was unharmed, got on the horse, had her canter around a bit, rebuilt the jump, and as she approached the fence, the coach said, and this is a quote, remember what you did last time. Now, perhaps I've told you enough by now for you to be able to imagine the outcome. It was an identikit fall, and I would say that coach was really responsible for that fall, and instead she should have been reminding that child about the things that would work. Pay attention to your canter, keep the rhythm, keep the impulsion, keep your eyes up, really bear down, have your thighs on. And all those things would have been useful reminders to help to get the right outcome. A friend of mine in America, Sandy Howard, who was part of the US dressage team in the early 80s, she'd known me for a while and we talked about mental rehearsal when she suddenly thought, oh, now I get it. In my highly competitive days, I used to do my mental rehearsals lying in bed. This is not ideal. And she would always fall asleep at some point through the Grand Prix test. She never got to the end, and of course she never rode the second half of the test as well as she rode the first half of the test. But at the time she never put two and two together. Now, really, you want to do your mental rehearsals sitting up in a firm enough chair to keep you alert. If you find them difficult, do it sitting on your saddle on a sturdy saddle horse. The fact that you have your body in that position will make a difference. Also, if you find it difficult, you might want to do mental rehearsals in little pauses in your ridden session. After you've done something, well, just stop for a minute, drop the reins, do a little mental rehearsal while it's really clear, hopefully to your kinesthetic memory and your body. So Sandy maybe could have started her mental rehearsal of the test halfway through if she had to do it in bed and that would have helped her with the second half or better still, done it sitting up. I also heard the story of an Australian swimmer who was competing at state and I think national, international levels. And she had felt traumatized by, by coaches and sports psychologists who'd really emphasized the visual element of her mental rehearsals. But she was one of the 2% of people who couldn't close her eyes and make pictures. All she ever saw when she closed her eyes was blackness. Now, I too am one of that 2%. And I told you earlier on how surprised I was when people started telling me I painted such wonderful pictures for them. And in my words, as I was coaching, because as far as I was concerned, I was talking about feelages, but it really doesn't matter. But anyway, for this swimmer who was really struggling, she found herself talking to Ian Gorler, who was a well known figure in Australia. As a young man he had bone cancer, he had a leg amputated, he got down to being given two weeks to live. And he did live and spent his life working with people with cancers, teaching them the skills of visualization and the imaginations that could help their healing. And he started working with this swimmer saying, well, no worries if you can't see it, just do it through the feel. And actually research in coaching, some of which was done in swimming, really talked about coupling the action of something to an effect. So it really helps swimmers in their training to focus on the feel of pushing the water back and not just pushing their hand or arm back. In other words, they're focusing on the intended effect of their action. In golf, it helps to focus on the club head motion and the intended trajectory of your ball, not just your arm movement. Now this is true for us as well as riders, our mental rehearsals should include our horse, the effect of our body on our horse, not just a body part. So on that way, we're doing our mental rehearsals of riding on interface. Now, I confess that my early mental rehearsals, if I go back 40 years, weren't that they were just internally off body parts. And actually I realized not even of my whole body. Took me a long time to work that one out. But I think the reality is that that was showing me a lot about what my nervous system knew and about its limitations as I was, as it were, taking the car engine to pieces, examining those pieces, and eventually being able to put it back together again. So your mental rehearsal will illustrate how much your brain knows and how your neurological patterning is or isn't efficient. So you can do it at the level at which you can do it, but your aim is to get it to interface. Let me tell you this story of a workshop I did in London in those early days of mental rehearsal, teaching mental rehearsal in workshops that were a series of evenings. And I would go around the group and ask them about their mental rehearsal. And really I was more interested in, were they seeing a video of them, were they experiencing the feelings, how detailed was it? And within one group, there were two women. One had not ridden with me. I really didn't know her well. And I start asking her about her mental rehearsal, and she's going, it was a riding canter and she's going, it was like flying. And I'm saying, okay, so can you tell me more about that? How is it different to usual? What were you doing different to usual? And she was going, I really don't know. But it was like flying. And all of my questions, trying to elicit more detail, just got the response. It was like flying. There was someone else in the group who was a young professional who I did know rather well. And when I got to ask her about her mental rehearsal, she was going, well, I'm riding circles in trot on the left rein. That's my difficult direction. I tend to lose my outside seat bone off to the right and collapse a bit to the inside. But in this mental rehearsal, I can really feel how my seat bone is there by the horse's spine, and I'm keeping it really narrowed in and far back. And I can feel how I can initiate the turn from there and how the horse is beginning to turn from behind the saddle. And it's really clear when I do that, I'm not even tempted to pull on the inside rein. And I can feel the horse's wither. Coming out on the track where I want it to be, and I'm double checking that my chin and my zipper are over the horse's mane. But as long as I've got that seat bone in the right position and I can feel it and my outside thigh, I'm doing really well. And if I lose, what happens is, well, who is going to go out and be able to live their mental rehearsal in real life the next day? The woman with the obviously wonderful I'm flying experience is going to have to wait until the sunshine God smiles and the wind's in the west. Whereas my young friend, who's the young professional, has got so much information that she can pretty much just go out and do. And she was doing it on that level of goal, action, coupling, what she had to do to change her horse and how she felt her horse change. Realize that Chris Bartle's mental rehearsal was not an idealized fantasy. It wasn't that. Trot, trot, trot, trot, halt, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, trot, circle, circle, circle, circle. It was detailed every step, every half halt, every correction, really showing exactly how much his brain knew about this and very much on interface. But maybe you've had the experience of watching high level dressage, maybe in the flesh or on tv, and you watch someone like Charlotte Dujardin and maybe you watch her whoosh across the diagonal in Half Pass and your heart leaps and you think, how beautiful, I want to do that. And you have this imagination in your mind of whooshing across the diagonal in Half Pass. Well, you're working on some idealized fantasy. It's not accurate, it doesn't have corrections, it's not on interface, it's not getting it, losing it, fixing it. And whilst it's a lovely experience at the time, it won't work, it won't increase your skill. Working on the edge of your personal best is really important. Many people find it quite difficult if they're mentally rehearsing a dressage test, to really keep their brain around going round corners and turning back and going the other way. I find that quite difficult, actually, and have a terrible sense of direction. I could go in a department store, come out to the high street and walk in the wrong direction whilst intending to go the direction I'd been going. And I imagine these two are related. And there was one international dressage rider of a few years ago, well known, who apparently took a little rug with him to all his competitions and would put his rug down on the ground and walk trot and canter his way around the rug in mentally rehearsing his test. Now, how well he did that in terms of a really good mental rehearsal of the neurological patterns, and how much it was just a test that he knew the way, I don't know. But if you find it difficult to deal with direction, you might want to do your mental rehearsal standing up on a rug where you do move and you do keep your geometry and your geography working for you. I find it almost works, too, to imagine myself on horse with a screen in front of me that moves as I move and goes around all the corners. And I have one young friend, actually, who, in one of her early competitions, the judge rang the bell after she'd halted and saluted, and she looked around, thought that was a bit strange and realised she was facing the wrong direction. So she went around to do this again. And I don't know where she started from, but she ended up halted on the centre line, again facing the wrong direction. In your mental rehearsals of a test, be sure you know at the very least whether you're going towards the judge or away from the judge, even if you can't nail other facets of the venue. If you're doing a much bigger competition than you've ever done before, this might especially be true going cross country, where there could be crowds, and you haven't had a lot to do with crowds and neither has your horse. You really want your mental rehearsal to include those crowds, not as a distraction, but just so you know that they're there. You know there'll be colour and faces, you know there'll be movement, you know there'll be a certain amount of noise and, you know you need it to not distract you, and you need to be so together that that you can help it not distract your horse. I read recently about one of the coaches and managers for the England football team who have notoriously been bad historically at penalty kicks. And previous coaches have gone, well, you just can't practice them. You know, nothing's like the competition, and I'm sure there's a level of nothing is like the competition. But in their practicing of penalty kicks, they practice standing in the middle of the pitch doing what must be the very long walk from the centre of the pitch to where you take the penalty kick before you take the kick. And including that in coaching and getting people to include that in their mental rehearsals would be really important because it must be emotionally, really taxing to do that. And unless you somehow account for that and write it into your practice it could shock you into poorer performance. People tend to naturally do mental rehearsal of the things they're passionate about. The England footballer David Beckham, I know, spent his childhood for hours kicking balls against the garden shed as if that was a goal with his dad as the goalie. And I rather suspect he might have spent his time in school doing mental rehearsal of footballs and especially goals, when he was supposed to be paying attention in lessons. And if you have kids that fantasize a lot at school and don't pay a lot of attention to lessons, they might as well be fantasising about something useful. And it could pay to really ask your kids whether they ride or whether they do other sports. When you think about doing your sport inside your head, what happens? Do you get a picture of it? What kind of picture do you get? Is it just you from the outside? Is it what you see out of your own eyes? And maybe you can kind of teach them a little bit about mental rehearsal without making it a big deal. And that will be so valuable to them. So interesting for you to learn more about how they tick. But you've got to do it in a kid friendly way so you don't push them off. That guy who played rugby and had this vision from a camera in the sky of the whole pitch and where everyone was and where they were going and where the ball was and how the play would pan out, I suspect that nobody taught him that and that he just stumbled on that strategy. But it could be a great story to tell your kids. I wonder too whether coaches have woken up to that strategy and teaching that strategy is in the intervening years. I suspect at the grassroots level that's unlikely, just as kids learning to ride don't get taught mental rehearsal either. I hope I've given you some good ideas here as well as interesting, entertaining information. And next time round we'll tie this all together and in the meanwhile, enjoy your horses and your riding. Do little bits of mental rehearsal. Don't make it a chore, do it lightly. Don't go on for too long. Just see if you can begin to build your skills. It will pay you handsomely. And I'll be back with this soon.