What's Holding You Back in Your Polo?

pep talks riding Nov 28, 2020
 

I want to take you back to a video I did live from King's Polo Club, and quickly chat to you about some things that might be holding you back in your polo.

Do you know what your weaknesses are?

Do you know what's holding you back?

Have you identified them yet and starting working on fixing them?


What's Holding You Back in Your Polo?

Transcription:

Well, good morning gang. Here. We are again in The Kings polo club here in Egypt, outside Cairo. And I'm sitting in the courtyard here, which is a little bit of a work in progress at the moment.

You can see the polo field in the gap behind me here. And as I turn, you can see the window on the stables. I'm sitting in the wash bay. You can see this boom overhead that will be the wash line. And this particular bay, there are four of them that do six horses at a time.

There's the next block of stables. And then there are two more over behind that. So a great place to be and a great place to work and having a good time here, but just through the change of setting might actually be quite nice to just check to you about a subject that is, is quite important in my life as a coach.

And that is, have you asked yourself what is holding you back in your polo? Because if you honest with yourself and you ask yourself that question, it really helps you to progress and you need to be brutally honest with yourself.

Okay. Is it that basically you've stopped getting any coaching and your swing is not great. And you know, you, you haven't really gone back to the basics because I look at my self with my coaching and I went and got golf coaching for a long time.

Not because I particularly want to be a good golfer, but just because I think that there's so much money spent in golf and the two swings, the golf swing and the polar swing are so similar that it helped me with my polar coaching. And that was what I was after.

But what was interesting to me was that the coach, I went to spent a long time just getting the basics, right. He got my stance, right? My swing plane, right? And only let me use the easiest club in the bag, which is a wedge of very short little club until I'd got proficient at doing what he asked me to do.

And I see so many club golfers, for example, blazing away with their drivers and all the difficult clubs in their bag and not paying attention to basics. And they never get good at golf, but it's the same at polo guys.

If you don't go and I knock those gremlins in your swing, you never going to achieve at the sport and you never going to get as good as you can get. So is that an inhibiting factor is possibly your fitness and inhibiting factor because if you, this is a very physical game, okay.

And if you are unfit, then maybe that is stopping you, playing and progressing how you would like to progress. And I go back to a story of my son who is a gym freak and fit.

And he used to play polo in the past. And I took him and gave him four chuckkas. And at the end of the day, we went to bed the next morning, he looked at me and said, pop, I can't get out of bed. He was so stiff that he actually couldn't move. So, there's only one way to get really riding for and that's to ride.

So, do as much of that as you can and get yourself in as good a shape as you can. Okay. But be honest about what actually inhibiting you going forward, because it might be a mental thing too. Do You know if you kind of saying to yourself, oh, well, I wasn't really trying. And that's why I didn't play well, that's an excuse for me.

And it brings warning bells because if you admit that you are trying and then did badly, you've got no excuses, but if you think to yourself, ah, I wasn't really trying, you know, there's an excuse in your head and it stops you being honest with yourself and progressing how you would like to progress in the sport. Okay.

So just be brutally honest with yourself as to what actually is inhibiting you going forwards and pay attention to the basics.

Just go back, get riding lessons, get your riding good. Because often the riding is one of the things that really inhibits you and stops you progressing. Okay.

And go back and get a sheepskin out and ride without stirrups, without a saddle, get your legs strong. Cause that gives you good hands. And so often just it's the writing.

That's inhibiting you 'cause if you can't ride well, you can't make the basic swing correctly because you cannot do it sitting on your butt. You get glued to the saddle, your, your torso won't move in the way it should move. So just a little prick in the bacteria from me to say, be honest with yourself and really assess yourself and go and get help In the areas that you are really Struggling with.

If it's, you know, actually polar related stuff and you can get basic training with that. And if it's not Rick on your mental side as well, cause that's as important. So hope that helps and see you in the next lesson.