HORSE AND RIDER
OPTIMISING YOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE PART 2: MINDFULNESS
W
e continue our series on practical psychological techniques to improve your athletic performance, with one of the most powerful techniques in modern psychology – mindfulness. Mindfulness has become a particularly prominent technique in recent years; the United States military has made mindfulness a mandatory course for soldiers, yoga practices build mindfulness into their design, and mindfulness has been hailed as the new wave in therapy for an array of psychological conditions. The second part of this series aims to equip you with a fair understanding of mindfulness, and teach you practical techniques that can be used to improve your psychological performance in the arena. This specific mindfulness technique works hand-in-hand with the
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practice of coherent breathing, which was expounded upon in the October edition of HQ so if you haven’t yet, I would recommend reading that article first.
NOTE There are a number of ways to practice mindfulness, and which one you subscribe to is entirely based on your desired outcome. The technique discussed in this article is largely sport-specific, tailored to the equestrian environment, and designed to integrate into the other two components of this series – coherent breathing and mental imagery.
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