A wee bit of adrenaline
I don’t care who the rider is or how many Grand Prix tests they have ridden. I’m willing to bet their pulse goes up a wee bit as soon as that bell goes. The best riders manage it brilliantly within a second or two.
The same is true of the horse. Horses are not machines. They change on the day, and you should expect them to. Riders change too. The question is not how to stop that happening. It is how to make sure that when it does, both of you can cope.
No new problems, just magnified ones
Here is something we see over and over again. Horses do not produce new problems at competitions. All that happens is that the existing problems become a bit magnified.
Horses don’t produce new problems on competition day. The existing problems just get a bit magnified.
So if a horse is a bit stressed in its day-to-day work, it is going to be more stressed at a show. And that sort of stress usually comes from discomfort. It is the same thing we talk about over and over again: to train a horse, it has to be comfortable.
If it is comfortable physically, it will be comfortable mentally. If it is comfortable mentally, it will cope. Depending on its character, it will cope with the extra stresses of a competition, and that is what we are after. If the way of working is basically comfortable, the horse will come to the party sooner rather than later.
That means the work you do on nerves starts long before the show, at home, in the quality and comfort of everyday training.
When someone is watching
Most riders know this one. A friend comes to watch, or there is one person on the rail, and suddenly the horse feels completely different. Amanda asked me about it on the podcast: how much of that is us? How much do the small changes in our own body, a bit of fight or flight, a little locking up, travel straight to the horse?
There is no doubt that it happens. This is where sports psychologists do a really valuable job, and I think there is certainly a role for them in the horse world. From my side, the most useful thing I can say is to keep your attention on your own performance and how it feels to you. Not on how it might look from the rail. The more of your attention is on the horse, the less there is left over for the audience.
What the top riders do in the warm-up
There are also some more technical reasons riders get stressed at a competition, and a lot of it is to do with the way they work in.
The last time I was at Aachen, I watched the riders working in for the Grand Prix, and I thought most of the German riders were brilliant. They generally worked in for about 20 minutes:
Ten minutes of easy work. Relaxed, stretchy, bendy, just giving the horse time to loosen and feel at ease.
Ten minutes of real work. Trying one or two of the exercises, a change or two, a bit of piaffe. Just one or two simple things, with little breaks in between: two or three minutes of work, 30 seconds off, then pick up again.
What struck me was that they simply picked the horse up and expected it to be in control. They could go from their stretchy work to their collected work very quickly. They may have ridden earlier that morning, I don’t know. But in the lead-up to the test, they did less rather than more.
In the lead-up to the test, the top riders did less rather than more.
In this country, I often see riders working in for far too long. By the time the horse actually goes down the centre line, it is basically over it.
Control first, then quality
There is a natural desire at a competition to show the horse at its very best, so riders work in trying to produce beautiful work. Then they come out of the arena and say, “It does this beautifully at home, and today it was nonsense.”
A lot of that is because they forgot that once they come down the centre line, they have to stop at X and move on. Go faster, go slower, go sideways, whatever the test asks. That requires control. In the work-in, the first thing to think about is whether you have the control to ride that test comfortably. If you have the control, the quality will come. If you work in for beautiful work and then it all goes to pieces at X, it is the work-in philosophy that needs to change.
The riders I watched at Aachen could do less because they were confident in their control. That confidence, knowing you can come down the centre line and perform every exercise with a degree of success, is massively important to competing.
Find your problems at home first
So how does a rider know whether they are in control? Ride a test at home.
Riders are often encouraged not to, with the worry that the horse will start to anticipate. But you don’t have to ride the same test. Ride different ones. For the rider, what matters is the confidence of knowing there is nothing in the test that will scare or surprise the horse. The work is all there.
Each year, for the three months leading up to Horse of the Year, I would ride a test most days at home. A different one each time: the Grand Prix, the Special, the Freestyle, the Inter II, older Grand Prix tests. It was simply to know what was likely to go wrong and to have some remedies for it. Because if you ride through tests frequently, lots of things go wrong. Better to find them at home, so that when the bell goes on competition day, nothing in that arena takes the horse by surprise.
Halfway between home and the show
The best way to minimise nerves is to compete more. Look through the European results and the top riders are out almost every week, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Vienna, somewhere new each weekend. When you come down the centre line that many times, it has to take the edge off.
We have a real problem in this country: there are simply not enough competitions. So the next best thing is to ride through enough tests at home, with a little extra pressure on. Filming a test and having it judged does exactly that. It is not as stressful as real competition, but it is enough of a stimulus to get you used to performing when the bell goes. It sits halfway between schooling privately at home and being out competing.
We have had riders send in several tests in a row, and you can see their performance getting better test after test. They look more familiar with the whole idea. They look less like a fish out of water coming down the centre line.
Ride enough tests and you stop looking like a fish out of water coming down the centre line.
There is a bonus, too. You get to see yourself. Sometimes that is a shock: it felt much better than it looks. But keep doing it and the progress you can make just from watching yourself is remarkable.
The one piece of advice
If you ask me how to overcome nerves, the answer is repetition. Start with some online tests. Keep doing them. Work through it. You will prove to yourself that you survive, and each time the bell will matter a little less.
A PRX™ Training Test is built for exactly this. Ride it at home, film it, and I will mark it and walk you through your ride on video. The only people who see it are you, me and whoever is holding the camera. If you would like to read more about the judge’s side of the bell, read The judge is marking the day, not you.