Thriving in Chaos: PBR Teams’ Training Camps Condition Bull Riders’ Hearts and Minds

Mental conditioning and team bonding is first consideration in life-and-death sport

From a cattle ranch in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to deep-sea fishing off South Florida to a cold-water pool in Fort Worth, Texas, PBR Training Camps are in full swing.

Unlike some other pro sports, you won’t see out-of-shape athletes toning up for the coming grind. Cue the James Harden joke.

Bull riders are a different sort. Without mega-million-dollar contracts, who can afford to get fat?

And who has the time? The PBR Teams season is in action less than two months after World Finals crowns an individual champion.

Ahead of the 12-event regular season starting on July 12 in Oklahoma City, training camps allow riders to tune up on a few bulls. Coaches may give young talent a chance to ride their way into the starting five.  

But honing riding mechanics while risking injury is not the main reason for coming together during the brief offseason.

More than the boo-ya jolt felt after dominating a thrashing beast, camps aim for soothing moments of kumbaya among teammates now seeking more than individual glory.

“There was always a brotherhood in PBR. Team competition made it stronger,” said former Navy SEAL Sean Murphy, who works with the Carolina Cowboys. “On a team, these athletes can succeed even if they didn’t ride their bull that night. They rely on each other now.”

Joao Gabriel of the Carolina Cowboys with water weights forcing him to use his core to maintain balance. / Courtesy Miranda Faye Photography

Meantime, astute coaches are making mental notes on what makes each rider tick.

At the training camps, many are getting their first dose of sports psychology. 

New York Mavericks head coach Kody Lostroh, who was inducted into PBR’s Ring of Honor in 2023 five years after hanging up his bull rope, believes his players’ minds need as much attention as their bodies.

That approach worked well for him.

In 2009, 24-year-old Lostroh hired a sports psychologist. He would go on to win the PBR World Championship, riding 7 of 8 bulls at World Finals to beat out J.B. Mauney, who nearly caught him in turning in the sport’s first perfect 8-for-8 Finals. 

“I was fairly talented; when I dug into the mental side, that’s when I got better,” Lostroh said.

As coach of one of the league’s two expansion teams, Lostroh is charged with making individuals and the proverbial sum of the parts greater. To do so, he pushes his riders into the deep end of sports psychology – literally.

For 3 days in late June, the Mavericks spent six hours in a pool at Texas Wesleyan University doing underwater exercises…while holding their breath.

If that sounds like something going down at Guantanamo Bay, consider the growing science around “breath-hold training,” proven to improve decision making during stressful situations. 

Nobody wants to court psychological stress. Some avoid harsh physical activity. Put them together – under water sans oxygen – and the brain can be rewired.

Treading water while playing hot potato with a 10-pound brick or schlepping 35-pound dumbbells at the bottom of a deep pool while desperate for air is to the brain what free weights are to the biceps. Nascent studies show traumatic exercise can train a person to perform better under pressure.

“The goal was to jack up our heart rates and induce fear/panic so we could learn to control them, important skills for anyone who experiences duress and absolutely crucial for a bull rider,” wrote award-winning journalist Matt Crossman in his Accidental Adventurer blog, teasing what portends to be a gripping participatory story in Western Horseman.

“Whenever I got down to the bottom of the 12-foot pool, it felt like someone squeezed my forehead in a vice. I could almost hear my sinuses getting squished…The bleeding stopped on Day 3, so I resumed the training but stayed in shallower water.”

The bull riders fared better. For the record, Crossman’s bloody nose gushed outside the pool, so don’t go picturing Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw in pink, murky water.

“It’s like doing CrossFit under water,” said Lostroh. “Your body is screaming for you to get out, and your mind has to focus on the task to get you out. Like most things, the physical aspect is simple compared to the mental aspect. The idea is to get our minds to work for us instead of against us.”

The Mavericks picked up Brady Randolph in the 2024 Expansion Draft / Courtesy Chandler Bradley/PBR

Lostroh believes breath-hold training can clear his riders’ heads, improving their performance during the mayhem of bull rides.

“It’s chaos on the back of the bull,” he said. “If you can manage that situation and keep your cool in a pressure-packed, dangerous situation, you can make the right decisions.”

And win championships.

In a similar vein, to train the riders on decision-making amid life-and-death chaos, Carolina Cowboys’ GM Austin Dillon brought in Murphy, who served with the US Navy SEALs for 22 years before founding Hit the Surf.

The two first met at a Clint Black charity concert. Murphy heard Dillon was a driver and assumed he was transporting the band. Dillon laughed, explained what he did for a living in NASCAR, and an immediate friendship was struck.

Listening to Murphy explain his views on sports psychology, the 2018 Daytona 500 champion-slash-PBR Teams executive wanted him as a trainer. 

“In bull riding, everyone talks about 8 seconds,” Murphy said. “It’s not about the 8 seconds, it’s about the lifestyle the athletes live – their standards, discipline, and mindset – to get to that moment. How do you get to the point of thriving in chaos instead of steering clear of it?”

In special forces, as in bull riding, each individual will reach a moment in their career when they’ll have an inner conversation asking, Is this what I really want? Am I willing to suck it up, endure the ever-present danger, hardship, and pain, and do whatever it takes to succeed?

To make it as a bull rider, 9-time rodeo world champion Ty Murray says it’s damn the torpedoes. A champion mashes the accelerator to the floor on the most treacherous roads.  

Physically and mechanically bull riding is difficult, Murray contends, but not any more than any other sport. A rider’s success begins in his head…and lives in his heart.

“In any sport there’s five basic things you have to do, and if you can do them all well, you’re going to be pretty good at that sport,” he said. “What separates our sport and brings it to another level is you have the same pressures – winning or losing, money and championships – along with the real chance of dying every single time. So, mentally, the pressure is to live in that space and still go for it.

“What separates the men from the boys is the guys who learn to hit the gas when everyone else is wanting to take their foot off the pedal. It’s a very hard thing to do. It’s not an accident that I had a family late in life. I couldn’t go to the world’s most dangerous job every day and put my foot on the gas when every fiber in my soul was saying ‘take it off’ because I had a wife and baby at home waiting for me. We (bull riders) have the pressure of winning and losing and also the pressure of living or dying.”

In the primal matchup between cowboy and bull, where the animal heavyweight always dictates the play, can a man be taught to match the level of a beast who will never back down?

Murphy, who spent most of his career on elite Seal Team 6, performing top secret missions at the behest of the President, starts on a counterintuitive note. He wants to remove an athlete’s sense of invincibility to get him comfortable with dealing with inevitable failure.

“At the beginning, I ask, ‘What’s one mistake you’ve made?’ Let’s eradicate the feeling of needing to be perfect. It’s how you recalibrate your mindset in handling failure that drives you to greatness. We want (the athletes) to learn from their failures and each other.”

While his military experience across multiple continents involved higher and more profound stakes – “keeping the person next to me alive to fight for the greater good” as Murphy puts it – his PBR program drew on commonalities observed.

“What separates the great from the good within chaos is your mindset with adversity. It’s coming. What you do during those moments defines you and will put an indelible stamp on a team’s dynamics,” he said.

For their bonding, the Florida Freedom went deep sea fishing. The Kansas City Outlaws brought to their camp two-time Super Bowl Champion Creed Humphrey, center for the Kansas City Chiefs. And the Austin Gamblers’ flew more than 5,000 miles to Cachoeira Paulista, SP, Brazil and the ranch of Adriano Moraes, the 3-time PBR World Champion who serves as the team’s assistant coach and director of Brazil Operations, planting the team’s flag in Brazil year-round.

“With many riders coming from Brazil, going to the Moraes ranch is a chance for our coaches and American riders to see where our guys are from and better understand their culture and how their bull riding journey got started,” explained General Manager JJ Gottsch.

One of the team’s biggest stars, Dalton Kasel, getting his body fully healed for the Teams season, didn’t plan to compete in Brazil. He left his riding gear in America.

But at the Festa do Peão de Americana, a massive rodeo-music festival drawing a quarter-million people which includes a PBR-sanctioned Iron Cowboy and in total draws a quarter million people, Kasel heard about a charity ride on the top bull in Brazil in support of Hospital de Amor. He asked if he could get on to raise money for the philanthropic hospital specializing in cancer treatment.

“With Dalton’s popularity in Brazil, the promotion took off and money started pouring in,” Gottsch said.

The only thing missing was riding gear. Kasel’s teammates chipped in. He used Lucas Divino’s vest and chaps, Ramon de Lima’s gloves, Ezekiel Mitchell’s rope and a local rider’s helmet.  

Kasel’s out would generate over $1 million Brazilian Reais ($185,000) in less than 24 hours, Gottsch said.

Lunches and dinners at the Moraes ranch included meat cooked over a ground fire from an authentic “Fogo de Chao” as well as ox tail and ox foot soup; Yucca soup with sausage and bacon; beef ribs; squash with cream cheese; rice. Acai berry sherbert and flan were served for dessert.

The bull riders may not have arrived at camp looking like James Harden. But they sure do have a solid excuse if they leave that way.