Last Updated on May 6, 2026 by adminahb
For those who may not be familiar with equestrian psychology, how would you describe your role at Ahead for Horses and the positive impact it can have on a rider’s performance?
JM: A lot of people don’t actually understand what psychology is, but it is simply the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. It’s looking at how people think, how they feel, and then how they act. If we put that into a sporting setting, sports psychology is really about understanding how you can work on your mind to affect your behaviour just as deliberately as you would work on your body.
As riders, you’re already doing that physically all the time. You’re thinking about your natural aids in the saddle – your hands, your weight, your legs, your voice. So, what I do is really the next step on from that. It’s about helping riders understand how they can connect their mind, body and physiology so they can ride at their best.
What that looks like depends completely on the rider who is in front of me. For some riders, the issue isn’t nerves at all but the challenge of juggling everything that comes with running a business or the fact that you’re away from home so much. So, the work is about helping them get to the point where they can put their feet in the stirrups and just ride, without all the other worries going round in their head.
Then of course there are the areas people do traditionally associate with sports psychology – focus, emotional regulation, confidence, nerves, anxiety. Those absolutely matter as well. Going to your first championship, your first Olympics, your first Nations Cup – those are daunting moments. But actually, at the very top of the sport, particularly around the level we’re talking about with the Rolex Grand Slam, it’s often the wider system around the rider that becomes just as important as the nerves themselves.
I often explain sports psychology to riders in very practical terms. When I was a child, we used to put straw under a rug to cool a horse down and absorb sweat after exercise. Now we use very modern coolers, and the horse is dry in a few minutes. Sports psychology is the equivalent of using the modern tool that we now know works. It’s science-based, it’s been around a long time, and in other top sports there really isn’t anybody at elite level who isn’t working with someone in this space in one form or another.
So for me, the positive impact is that it helps riders perform better, yes – but also live better, cope better, think more clearly, and become more effective in every area that supports performance. We need to remember that riders are people first, and then they ride horses.
This is the first part of our conversation. The full article is available on our website, with part two coming soon.
Read more here.
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