I bought a book! Haha, if you know me you know that is pretty much what I do, I am a book hoarder. But occasionally I actually read this stuff, and I wanted to share this book with you! It’s called Fit and Focused in 52 by Coach Daniel Stewart (link goes to amazon, alas I get no compensation for sharing these things.) Turns out he has a whole Pressure Proof Academy you can sign up for online that I am intrigued by, but what I really want is an unofficial Facebook community so we can just chat about it.  Maybe one or two of you will find this post and we can make a community together.

I’ve been studying kinesiology (human movement) and how we learn or the basis of talent (and oh yeah do I have some ideas for posts about THAT, short book list below), and this book really distills the core of both of these subjects into a few short, usable chapters.

The book is essentially 52 weekly prompts to help your “focus” on your game (sports psychology) and to improve your fitness with exercise that focus on sport-specific movements to improve your riding.  I love how they encourage a bootcamp-style workout at the barn!

The “Focus” activities for week on and two really spoke to me.  Week one is “The Five-Second Favor” and its really just how people at the barn help each other out. As I was reading it I realized I had really made a very concentrated effort to do that lately after seeing my friend doing a lot of work on our dressage arena. I also like to do things like help someone sweeping the aisle, spend a moment helping a freind clean up, hold a horse for someone when they run to the bathroom, pick up drinks on the way to the barn when it’s hot, etc.  Doing these things made me feel happy and connected to my friends at the barn, and hah! according to the book I am doing something right!  Then I skipped ahead to week two where they talk about getting “in the zone.” They suggest teaching yourself a rhythmic target sound, which I realized is what I do when climbing hills while road cycling (what I do when I’m not hanging out with Bow).  I had also worked with this with our dressage trainer while trying to keep Bow straight on a circle “whoa, leg, turn, straight.” We managed to get one nice 20 meter circle in on that lesson. 😉 I’m looking forward to future chapters in this book!

Let me know what your rhythmic mantra is!

Reading list: