How To Use A Wooden Practice Horse

Image Credit: Popular Mechanics Magazine (Oct. 1924)

The most underused piece of equipment at the polo club, after foot mallets, is probably the wooden practice horse. Chances are your club has one and chances are you’ve hopped on once or twice to almost immediately become bored with it and to idly wonder if it was even worth the effort of you put in to saddling it up.

If used incorrectly, the wooden practice horse is incredibly boring. If used incorrectly, it is not worth the effort you put in to saddling it up. But, as you’ve probably noticed, they key phrase here is “if used incorrectly.”

In this article I want to explain the proper way to use the wooden horse and to talk a bit about why it is important.

The proper way to use a wooden practice horse

The primary advantage of the wooden horse is that it allows you to practice your swing without worrying about the complex equation that is the horse. With the wooden horse you are able to exactly reproduce a given attack over and over again, ad infinitum, without variation. You are able to make mistakes without repercussion – no need to worry about accidentally hitting the horse’s legs or falling off – and so are able to practice and perfect variations to your swing that would be risky at best on a live horse.

Now that’s all well and good, but how do you actually practice on the wooden horse?

1. First, you need to adjust the stirrup length. Don’t just hop on and start swinging. Adjust the stirrup length to the length you would use if you were riding a live horse. If you don’t know what length to use, a good rule of thumb is to lengthen the leathers until when you stand up in the stirrups there is enough room to put a fist between your rump and the saddle.
2. Second, pick the mallet length you would use on a live horse if it were the same size as the practice horse. What length you use is really up to you, but if your practice horse stands only 14 hands high, you probably aren’t going to use a 54” mallet.
3. Now you’ve got your stirrups the right length and the right mallet for the job. The next step is to decide what you want to practice. Personally, I like to work on one swing per session so I can focus on only one set of motions at a time. I may work on the nearside forehander one day, the tail shot another day, etc.
4. If your practice horse is in a pit or cage, you need to pick a spot on the backboard you want to hit. In the case of the offside forehander, our target should be in front of and slightly to the right of center. Tape up a piece of paper if you need to. It doesn’t matter what kind of target you use, but you need to have one. If your practice horse doesn’t have a fence around it, set up a cone or a cup weighted with rocks somewhere out in front of you. The important thing here is to have something to aim at.
5. Once your target is set up it’s time to start practicing your swing. I’m assuming here that you know what the proper swing should be. If you’re just starting out and aren’t familiar with the mechanics of the different swings, pick up a copy of Hugh Dawnay’s Playmaker Polo – it will give you the basics of the correct swing.
6. Now don’t get lazy and start launching balls at the target as hard as you can. The practice horse gives you the opportunity to practice the ideal swing – so that’s what you want to do. Practice each swing in full: get up in two-point, glance at your target to position it in your mind, lean out over the ball, rotate your shoulders so they’re in-line with the “backbone” of the practice horse. Now make a slow controlled swing through the ball and follow through until your mallet is back in the vertical position. Do this for every single swing. Take it slow and try as hard as you can to make each shot perfect. If you can put some pressure on yourself, all the better. If/when you notice that you’re not deliberately going through every motion for every swing you either need to take a moment to refocus or you need to stop.

The purpose behind practicing like this, keeping each swing deliberate and slow, is to delay the automatizing process. Your brain wants to turn newly learned skills and movements into unconscious movements that you can perform on auto-pilot as soon as it can. The problem with this is that the brain is kind of lazy and it will settle for “good enough.” Your goal here should be to break down your swing into small parts and practice them all in sequence, but keeping your focus on each discrete part in turn. This will force your brain to internalize the “correct” movements rather than the “good enough” movements.

When you get on a horse (practice or real) and start blasting away at balls without aiming or focusing on your swing, you’re letting your brain get away with “good enough” and only reinforcing bad habits. Think of it like training a horse to halt. You say “whoa!” sit down in the saddle, pull back on the reins…and the horse keeps going for a few steps and eventually stops sideways. You can either keep working on the halt until the horse does it correctly each time, or you can say “Eh, good enough” and go on riding. One way is going to result in horse that stops well even in games, the other way is going to result in a horse that’s just dangerous.

Practicing on the wooden horse is the same way. This is your chance to practice in the ideal situation, if you let your brain get away with “good enough” on the practice horse in an ideal situation, you can probably imagine how many corners you’re going to unconsciously cut when you’re in a match and in a less-than-ideal situation. Your swing certainly isn’t going to get any better.

I can guarantee you that there is no single high-goal player out there who’s gotten his handicap by just hopping on a horse and blasting away at balls. These players put in hundreds and hundreds of hours in the saddle doing the “boring” work of practicing their swings. In fact, we can expand that to include every high-level athlete. No one gets there through talent alone…in fact, my guess is that if you asked them, they would all agree that natural talent accounts for very little the further your progress in the sport.

According to Geoff Colvin in his book, Talent is Overrated, Benjamin Franklin would take essays from The Spectator magazine and translate them into verse, then back into prose, then he would analyze his essay sentence by sentence to find all the ways it was inferior to the original.

The point is that good practice accounts for almost everything.

Your homework from all this is to review the fundamentals of the swing you want to practice until you know them by heart. Then go out to the practice horse and practice them. I think you’ll find that with a target and a goal, the practice horse will prove to be a lot more rewarding, and enjoyable, than you found it previously.