Intro to Teaching

Teaching horses is easy. Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. Expect little, praise often. I love the progression of teaching horses... even if its not always the lateral progression we hoped for! I absolutely live for the moment when you feel the horse underneath you "get it."

Teaching people is a completely different ball of wax, and one that I have given a wide berth to all these years. Recently I've had occasion to trade a couple lessons for favors to a couple different victims volunteers and it has been an education for me! I rarely talk about riding-- either I'm busy doing the riding, or I'm hanging out with friends or co-workers who haven't the slightest idea so I try to talk about other things. So now to switch gears completely and to try and talk non-stop about riding is tough! I think many people get the introduction to teaching through Pony Club, but since I was never really involved in a Pony Club, I missed the gradual, regimented introduction, and just dove in head first!

So here are some initial lessons I learned while giving my first "lessons."

1.) The easiest way to diagnose the problem is to watch the horse. Maybe the riders heels go up a bit over the fence, or she pinches with her knees a bit, but if the horse is flipping his head because she forgets to release, that's where you should start. Working your way back to the rider is much easier after you have a happy horse.
2.) No exercise is too simple. Its easy to want to "go big or go home" with the exercises like the big time clinicians, but instead it is important to "teach the rider in front of you," just like you must always "ride the horse underneath you." You can teach a lot with just two poles on the ground!
3.) Imagining you are the one riding can help diagnose the problem, but its also a crutch. By imagining its you up there, you can imagine what you might do different, but by the time your brain has connected to your muscle memories and then back to your brain, the moment has probably passed when you need to tell the rider to do that thing that you would have done if it were you!
4.) So, knowing that, what do you do? Go with your gut instinct. But then make sure you explain your gut instinct as you go-- as you're articulating your idea, you might just say something worth saying!
5.) There's an expression that I love in French, "la conaissance des escaliers." Literally it means "the knowledge of the stairs," but it is expressing that moment when you walk away from someone and come up with the perfect comeback as soon as you leave their presence. Similarly, there are many moments of 'Ah ha!!' about 40 minutes after the lesson is over. Best thing to do is to write it down and plan to work on it next time. (There will be a next time, right?!)
6.) The more you do it, the better you get. Duh, right? ...So, who wants a free lesson?

Green Horses & Green Riders; or, the Confidence Bank

It’s a cold fact, but we’ve all seen it. Green riders riding big, fancy, talented horses—and they are scared to death. They lounge the horse until it is exhausted, wait until the arena is empty, or find a secluded part of the show grounds, and get on with great trepidation. They hold their breath and tighten every muscle in their body. Through clenched jaws they mutter “Ho! Ho!” in some attempt to make the horse “relax.” Meanwhile, the horse, which looked completely calm while lounging, now has his eyes rolling to the back of his head. Mom doesn’t think this is a good idea, so why should he? Inevitably, they won’t have a good ride, the rider will lose even more confidence, and the vicious cycle will continue.

To break the cycle, the best case scenario is to get the horse in training, followed by the rider getting lessons as well until horse and rider can form a partnership. Another perfectly reasonable decision would be selling the horse for something more suited to the rider’s speed. This could be anything from an OTTB packer, to a TB/Draft cross that comes with brains “pre-installed.”  At the end of the day, we’re out there to have fun, and how much fun is it to ride a horse that is bred to do Rolex, if you can’t get him around a novice course?

Confidence, for you AND your horse, is like a bank. You can put confidence in, you can take confidence out, but you can’t take out more confidence than you put in. If you and your horse have been jumping 2’6” really well for a few months, you’ve been making small deposits in to that bank. If, then one day in the course of a jump school you raise one jump to 3’ and it goes well, you just put in a BIG deposit for your next beginner novice! If, however, you raise the entire course of show jumps to 3’, you will likely become a little strung out and frantic, and even if all the rails stay in the cups, you just took a big withdrawal out of the bank to make it happen.

Many upper level riders will only ride preliminary sized cross country efforts in the lead up to their biggest shows for this very reason. It’s important that horse and rider have done their homework well in advance of these big shows, so for the final lead up, they work on doing something the horse knows he can do, and feel good about it, adding money to the bank. When he gets out on the Big Course, hopefully his rider is giving him a good ride, but if the rider has a little bobble somewhere and the horse has to fend for himself and get them both out of trouble, he takes that big Withdrawal, but hopefully keeps going.

So think about that the next time you’re asking a big effort of yourself OR your horse. Is there money in your confidence bank?