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The Thinking Rider

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The Thinking Rider

Every horse and every training situation presents us with challenges and problems that we need to solve because no horse and no rider is ever perfect. There is always something that can be improved. In a sense, these imperfections and shortcomings give us a job. Without them, we would have nothing to do.
In order to decide what topic to work on, which exercise to choose, or which aid to give, we have to analyse the horse and the training situation. We normally notice surface level symptoms first, such as a rein contact that is too heavy, or too hard, or uneven, or a stiffness in the hindquarters, shoulders, or rib cage, or an issue with a turn, transition, or movement.

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3 Tips For Improving Your Canter Departs

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3 Tips For Improving Your Canter Departs

Recently, we have received a lot of questions about how you can improve the canter or the canter depart. This is obviously a major issue for many riders. This topic is very suitable for explaining the biomechanical principles behind it.

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The Topline

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The Topline

You can tell a lot about the training of a horse by looking at his muscle development, especially the muscles above the spine. Well trained horses have a well developed top line. Poorly trained horses often have a hole in their muscling front of the withers, the thoracic and lumbar spine may stick out, and the points of the hips are pointy. The muscles along the underneck may be hard and lumpy. Their lateral neck muscles may feel stringy and hard, rather than supple. Their hips and shoulders are often difficult to move because the muscles are so contracted that they don’t allow much movement.

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Consequences of Crookedness

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Consequences of Crookedness

In one of our courses, a member asked a question about crookedness. She wanted to know which exercises to ride on the hollow side and the stiffer side to combat the symptoms of crookedness. There is unfortunately not a simple, straightforward answer to this because crookedness leads to imbalance on several different levels, such as…

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Four reins and two bits… oh my, how do I start?

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Four reins and two bits… oh my, how do I start?

So you have decided to take the leap and start using a double bridle but you want to make sure you do it correctly. We have put our collective years of experience together to give some advice to help you achieve this.

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When a Flying Change Fails

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When a Flying Change Fails

When a flying change fails, the reason is usually that the horse became crooked and/or fell on the forehand. This results in a loss of the connection between the inside hind leg, the ground, the rider’s weight, and the reins which prevents the half halts from going through. That’s why things generally don’t improve if you keep cantering and keep repeating the aids for the flying changes.

It saves much time, sweat, and aggravation for both horse and rider, if you interrupt what you’re doing, bring the horse back to the trot or walk, or even to the halt, straighten and balance the horse, check his body for stiff, braced areas, remove the muscle blockages, and re-explain the biomechanics of the flying change (i.e. shift the weight, change the bend, move the pelvis).


As the horse is developing his conscious competence, he will often need time to think and to plan his next move so that he can perform the task deliberately. As he moves from conscious competence to unconscious competence, he can do flying changes anywhere, any time, with less and less preparation.

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What? Why? How?

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What? Why? How?

What? How? and Why? are the three big questions that every rider asks herself constantly and thatoften seem to be very difficult to answer. What should I do? How should I do it? And why should I do it? The reason why this information seems so elusive is on the one hand that many good riders make these decisions on a purely intuitive level without being able to render the decision making   process transparent or to explain it. - That was not really part of the traditional teaching paradigm, because it relied very much on the schoolmaster horses. In the old riding schools the trained schoolmaster horses were the true teachers. On the other hand, these decisions are often not that easy to make. Since we usually don’t have well trained Grand Prix horses as lesson horses nowadays, we have to find other solutions.
 

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10+ things WE learned while teaching our online course…

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10+ things WE learned while teaching our online course…

By now you are probably well aware that enrollment is open for our What, Why, How Online course, and I am sure you expect us to tell you all about the things the last students learned in the last course. However, they’re not the only ones that learned something. We came away from this course with some really interesting observations, which I’d like to share with you here today.

 

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