Moving On Up

Peter

3 years ago

I recently attended an on-line course run by Equestrian Australia to upgrade my skills as an instructor. I can now add SSTA (Skill Specific Trainer & Assessor) to my professional qualifications.

An area this course covered, were the stages of learning a (new) skill. There are three:

Cognitive – when the person learning the skills needs to think in detail about the skill, and there are frequent errors.
Associative – when the person learning the skill has progressed from thinking about how they are doing it
Autonomous – when the person executing the skill no longer thinks about it and can consistently perform the skill with minor errors rarely occurring.

It is consistent with what I tell my polo students, that in order to play polo, they have to learn three things:

How to ride.
How to hit the ball.
How to play the game.

It is very difficult to learn to hit the ball if you are still at the cognitive stage of cantering. Once riding skills become autonomous, you can then concentrate on adding the next skill, which is hitting the ball. And when you can do that autonomously, you can progress to shot selection and other tactical decisions.

It doesn’t mean that once you know how to canter, that you have mastered that skill. For example, in my Polo 200 lessons, my students have been cantering circles. To do this, they have to master

Walk to canter transition, striking off on the correct lead.
Riding canter circles, using their legs to make the circles smaller and wider. Remember, polo players need to be able to do this without having a contact or direct reining a horse.
Once they have an inside leg and an outside leg, we can add posting while cantering the circles.
Then we add a hitting skill to it – tapping the ball forward or back without breaking the canter or changing leads.
When this is mastered, we go to half swing cut shots and open backhanders.
Eventually, we get to tapping around in a circle.
Need to go up a level? Make the circles smaller and smaller.
Yet more levels? Increase the speed, accelerate out of circles, and hit away.

The exercise starts with the riding skill. Cantering circles – we all learned this in Pony Club, or the riding school, or dressage arena. How important it is to polo, shows up when a rider can’t ride a decent half circle onto a line to the ball.

(I see many a ‘trainer’ who has never played polo, or ever had an equitation lesson, or a lesson in how to instruct, teaching newbies how not to do it. If you are going to get a riding instructor, get a proper one. This sport is hard enough that you don’t need to start off with bad habits. But I digress.)

If you can’t canter a circle accurately, with a proper inside and outside leg, while posting to the canter, you won’t be able to get to the ball accurately enough to hit it. These skills have to be mastered before you can possibly go to the next level. It has to become autonomous.

As each skill becomes autonomous, you can go up a level. It’s like playing a game – master that skill, and move up a level.