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 in this
particular bay. They 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 I'm having a good time here. But I just thought a
change of setting might actually be quite nice to just chat to you about a
subject that 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 haven't really gone back to the basics? Because I
look at myself with my coaching, and I went and Golf coaching for a long
time, not because I particularly wanted 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 polo swing are so similar that it helped me with my polo 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, a 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 iron out those gremlins in your swing; you never
going to achieve at this sport and you're never going to get as good as you
can get, so is that an inhibiting factor? Is possibly your fitness an
inhibiting factor? Because 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
so fit, and he used to play polo in the past, and I took him and gave him four
chukkas, and at the end of the day we went to bed, and the next morning he
looked at me and said: "Pops, 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 fit... 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's actually inhibiting you
going forwards, because it might be a mental thing too. You know, if you are
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 were trying and then did badly you've got no excuses, but
if you say to yourself 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 because that gives
you good hands and so often it's the riding that's inhibiting you, because
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 torso
won't move in the way it should move. So just a little prick in the butt here
from me to say be honest with yourself, and really assess yourself. Go and
get help in the areas that you are really struggling with if it's
actually polo related stuff and you can get basic training with that. And if it's
not, work on your mental side as well, because that's as important. So I hope
that helps and see you in the next lesson.