Jacqui's path leads to me

  Jacqui has been coached elsewhere before and her path in trying to get better in her riding led her to me. On meeting we chatted over a hot drink of her past experiences and her aspirations. The skills check revealed partial footwork faults plus missing looking and body position so I made some set up changes and set to work on her. The look on her face when I said we will start with the drop technique was of worry but that soon subsided. I worked on her mental skill set too as i demonstrated the application of the skills set to the technique and Jacqui followed suit. It wasn't long before she was landing perfectly and in a short while used her mental skills to ride all 3 drops!
 We moved onto the skills trail and i broke the trail into bite sized segments so we could focus easier before adding it to the next and so on. Pumping was first and the energy gain was used to link berms, flat and switchback corners to rock gardens. We had a break and resumed where we left off and then worked on the fly out jump and linked it to a step. I could see that Jacqui was protecting herself on the jump technique so to her surprise I moved us onto a 6ft tabletop to really focus on her control of speed.

  I worked hard on both her mental skills and her body positioning and after a while she was airborne and later on she was sailing over the jump with ease! Her smile was beaming across her face every time.

We moved back to the trail and i worked on linking drop offs into corners by braking control and line choice and then at last it was time to ride the whole trail end to end. I could see that the mental aspect of jumping the tabletop had really drained her mentally but a few entire runs of the trail had Jacqui riding the trail end to end with control and confidence. Any error was self identified too but I could see that she was now drained. We moved away from the trail to work on riding steeps and after a demonstration Jacqui was too tired mentally to say yes to her mental skills questions and our session ended right there.
 An amazing session in many ways. See you soon Jacqui!
High5