Nothing is more central to your competitive-riding success than improving your riding skills. That’s why the primary thrust of our website is to bring you the best riding instruction possible. However, this presents quite a challenge, both in terms of the range of riding skills we need to cover and the depth of training we need to offer to cover them well. So we’re taking an entirely new approach.

To begin with, we’re turning to downloadable video to deliver an unparalleled depth of expertise. Downloadable video is just now becoming both highly practical and widely accepted for this kind of training, and it offers an incredible opportunity for equestrian training.

Most importantly, it gives us the ability to break down a very large amount of training material into small chunks. So, just as you can now purchase a single song through iTunes instead of a whole album of songs you don’t like, you can choose exactly what you need to learn most and get access to it immediately and inexpensively.

It also gives us the ability to complement our core training programs, represented by the top line of links in the banner above, with a wide variety of training tools specific to your riding discipline or show circuit (represented by the bottom line of links).

It will take us some time to develop the kind of training depth we envision, but once we’ve built it up, you won’t find a better, more complete training resource anywhere. You’ll be able to access a full curriculum of core training programs as well as tap into the unique insights of the most successful horsemen and instructors in your particular show circuit (or other show circuits for that matter).

Finally, we want to emphasize that we’re committed to delivering the best training possible. This means that we’ll take every possible opportunity to reach beyond rote instruction (“do this to get that result”) and help you develop the depth of understanding and intuition you need to succeed when your horse doesn’t respond exactly as he’s supposed to.

This is mostly about finding creative ways to develop a skill so well that you can be sure it will be there for you when you need it in the show ring. In fact, the all-too-common problem of not being able to replicate in the show ring what you did in the practice arena often comes down to not doing a good enough job of this.

Over time, we’ll pull together training techniques that can make a real difference in helping you execute your skills especially well in the show ring. And, because these techniques tend to change as you advance from one level to the next, we’ll organize them accordingly. Now let’s take a look at one example of the kind of issues we’ll be dealing with at each level.

Beginner Instruction: Developing Show-Ready Riding Skills

Talk to any good riding instructor and you’ll get this time-honored advice. As a beginning rider, you should get the calmest, most reliable lesson horse you can find so you can learn to ride without worrying about what unexpected thing your horse is going to do next. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to develop a good seat and learn how to steer and control pace at each gait. Then it’s a matter of adding more complex challenges one at a time until you can reliably execute the skills you need to get through beginner classes in the show ring.

The problem is, moving from the practice arena to the show ring introduces just as much mental and emotional over-loading as does an unpredictable horse, if not more. And riders who still have to pay a lot of attention to what they’re doing to execute their skills well, or who need a lot of support from their instructors every step of the way, typically hit a rough spot or two as they try to make the transition to real competition.

That’s why, among other things, we work on developing exercises and techniques that prepare beginning riders better for the show ring. In large part, this involves being creative about using the kinds of  “concurrent tasking” and “practice variation” principles we’ll speak more about under training productivity. This is mostly about coming up with “cognitively loaded” drills and competitions that are a lot of fun, but also improve a rider’s ability to execute her skills reliably while dealing with the added challenges of show-ring competition.

Intermediate Instruction: The Challenge of Moving Up to a Better-Performing Horse

As you advance to intermediate-level riding, you face a number of new challenges. Riding skills become more complex. The conditions under which you have to execute them get more challenging. Performance standards rise to reflect the greater capabilities of your competition.

But we also focus on another new challenge that requires you to step up your game, and it’s that your horse is suddenly not quite so predictable. That’s because the dullness, predictability and mistake-tolerance that make a good lesson horse worth its weight in gold are no longer what you need. To the contrary, these once-valuable traits are now barriers to success.

To perform well at an intermediate level, you need a horse that’s much more sensitive to your touch, more responsive to your cues and less programmed in his responses. For most disciplines, horses also have to have a lot more drive, which makes them more ambitious and much stronger in their reactions to what they sense. And they have to be more engage-able, which means that they’re also much more attentive to what’s going on around them and prone to distraction.

What all this means for you as an intermediate rider is that competitive riding becomes much more of a “read-and-react” sport than it was when you circled the ring in beginner classes. So, apart from developing your ability to execute prescribed riding skills accurately, you also have to develop the ability to read what your horse is going to do before he does it and react in time to head off unwanted responses in the making.

This requires a different set of skills, some of which, unfortunately, again fly under the radar of conventional riding instruction. So we’re putting our focus on developing innovative techniques that can help you tune into your horse better and stay one step ahead of him.

Some of these will include sensitization exercises that help you read your horse and his state of mind. Others will involve drills that both sensitize you to what unwanted responses feel like before they develop into problems and train you to react quickly enough to stop them in their tracks.

Advanced instruction: Helping Your Horse Become a Better Athlete

If you’re one of those fortunate enough to move up to advanced levels of competition, you’ll encounter yet another paradigm shift. At some point, everything we’ve talked about so far will become second nature and your challenge instead will be to help your horse become a better athlete.

What this means is that, as you enter the ranks of advanced riders, it’s no longer enough to execute prescribed skills well and keep your horse on the right track during a class. Now, you actually have to help him perform to the limits of his capabilities. This comes down to developing greater awareness of what your horse is doing physically and improving a variety of things stride by stride.

If you’re familiar with the “training scale”, or some equivalent, you already know what this is all about. It’s about improving things such as a horse’s rhythm, suppleness, contact, impulsion, straightness and collection so that he can perform his absolute best.

Sounds simple enough, right? But it’s not. Doing these things requires that you use your physiologic feedback senses (touch, proprioception, kinesthesia) in ways that you rarely do in everyday life, as you virtually never ride atop as unpredictable a conveyance as a living, breathing animal.

In the same vein, it’s also unlikely you’re all that familiar with using your body position, arms and legs to control something that has a mind and body of its own. So riding a horse is a unique experience when it comes to this kind of thing, and you have little experience to draw on. That’s why there’s a lot of room to develop new exercises and techniques to accelerate this learning process. And that’s what we’ve set out to do.

Special Topics

The above are just a few examples of what we mean when we talk about building better riding skills. We also plan to develop tools to help you deal with more specific challenges and situations.

Generally speaking, the key to success in this case is finding innovative ways to isolate problems that run beneath the radar of conventional riding instruction and deal with them effectively. We’ll have more to say about this later.

Next…

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