You are cantering towards the jump… 3… 2… 1… But instead of the ‘Jump’ that should have followed the 1; you get a chip in. A moment where your usually trusty horse decides to test both of you by inserting a little ‘half stride’ in there before takeoff! The result is you do a great Thelwell impression and your horse…
You have spent the past few months diligently improving your young horse’s standard of education. A lot of time invested on the basics of moving forward in a balanced rhythmic way. He is happy, you are happy and the next natural progression is to ask for the canter. However, it seems all those carefully cultivated hours in the arena fly…
Young horses! It is such an honour as a rider to be one of the first people they get to work with, however can sometimes feel like you are riding an eel! They are moving up and down in the rhythm and if there is a dance that you are both moving to, it quickly becomes evident that no one…
The bell rings, you set off aiming for the first fence, you pop over it… And suddenly it’s like everything begins to speed up and rather than being the pilot, you have somehow been relegated to passenger status. All the ‘if this then that’ scenarios you have spent months practicing are just gone and you are hoping that somehow, through…
Walking… Does your horse do it with a sense of purpose, or is he rather resembling a slowly rolling ball of jelly; going nowhere slowly? The problem many riders have is when we ask our horse to ‘walk on’, he becomes tense and stiff… The walk, when it is a good walk, should be forward-moving, unrestricted, and natural. There should…
Do you sometimes find yourself confused about the differences between rhythm and tempo and adjusting the stride of your horse when riding? Is is all a bit confusing whether or not while adjusting your horse’s stride, you are continuing ‘maintain the rhythm’ or keeping a ‘consistent tempo’? In this blog post I want to quickly help you begin to identify…
