Back to Basics

Ever feel like you’re getting nowhere? Or that you’ve been riding for years, and you feel like you’re getting worse? I’ll tell you a secret - that’s a good sign you’re progressing. When we start off as beginners, for the most part we don’t know what we don’t know. Yes, we realize we have a lot to learn. But the extent of that is beyond our comprehension when we first start riding.

Photo Credit: Mutt Love Photography

The amount of knowledge, experience, and practice it takes to become a skilled rider is absolutely mind boggling. No one outside of the horse world can fully comprehend the complexity of learning to ride and develop harmony in the tack. If you’ve been riding for any length of time, no doubt someone has said to you the classic line “The horse does all the work!” We’d all love to throw those people on a horse and make them do sitting trot for an hour, but instead we politely laugh. Nothing flags a person as a non-rider faster than delivering that inaccurate cliche.

I would dare to say that riding is the hardest sport to learn and perfect. Not only does it require an incredible amount of strength and coordination to perform well, as do many sports, you’re operating on top of a 1000+ lb animal with a mind of its own that is often moving its own body in an unpredictable manner. You don’t just have to learn to balance yourself, you have to learn to balance the horse - and to balance yourself on top of that unbalanced horse while it’s learning. All four quadrants of your body need to be able to move independently of one another. It’s not like throwing a basketball in a hoop where your entire body moves in the same direction as the ball.

When we start riding, or even before, we have this dream of complete harmony with our horse. That we move together as one, like a centaur. Whether it be dressage, jumping, barrel racing, pleasure riding, or any other discipline, we all have a goal of achieving partnership. If a layperson sees us riding and says the horse is doing all the work, we can take that as the highest compliment imaginable - we know how incredible it is to achieve a level of horsemanship where our aids are invisible and it truly looks like we are doing “nothing” but sit up there.

There is a fabulous meme out there that says “Beginners want to work on intermediate things, intermediate riders want to work on advanced things, and advanced riders focus on the basics.” This has proven to be extremely accurate as I have moved up the levels in dressage. Now that Lacey has technically learned all of the movements, our basics have become the focus of every single ride. Perfecting the transitions and half halts, the response to every aid, the details of the training scale. Even when we are having a stretchy ride or out for a hack, I am focusing on the quality of the connection, her gaits, her suppleness, her alignment, as well as my delivery of the aids.

Each time we move up a level, we might think we’ve mastered the level before - but then suddenly it becomes even more apparent where the holes in our training are. The standard increases as we climb through the levels. There are no steps we can skip. If we skip something at Training Level, it comes back to haunt us tenfold at Fourth Level. We think we have a fabulous canter transition, but then we attempt to teach the flying change and we realize we were missing straightness, suppleness and responsiveness. What worked at Second Level no longer works at PSG.

The criteria changes as we improve. What was good before is not even mediocre now. Not just from the perspective of judges in a dressage test, but by our own standards. We continue to expect more of ourselves and our horses as we improve. The more we learn, the more we are aware of the things that aren’t going well.

Ignorance is bliss. As a novice rider, things can start to feel pretty darn great. We have mastered the posting trot and picking up canter. We feel like we’ve really gotten somewhere. We aren’t yet aware of all the things we still need to learn. We don’t notice that our aids are sloppy or our position is off, we are just excited we can trot and canter without bouncing around. Then we hit a point in our lessons where our coach starts to explain more of the details and intricacies of the aids. What the horse should be feeling like. How to properly bend on a 20m circle or serpentine, not just ride the pattern.

At this point, we often feel like we’ve gone backwards. Sometimes we even want to quit riding. I was twenty-some years into my riding career and felt like I knew nothing, that I had an overwhelming amount to learn. Why did it take a couple decades to feel this way? Because it took me that long to realize how much I didn’t know. To learn enough to understand how much more there was yet to learn. Prior to that point, I didn’t have enough awareness of the highest levels of the sport to realize how far I still had to go. Grand Prix had seemed like an easy goal; if I just kept trucking along I’d get there pretty soon. Oh, the naivety! Horses have a way of humbling us, sometimes to the point where we wonder if we should even be doing this. But the answer is, yes, we should - as long as we are enjoying the journey and not just the goals.

I’ve had so many students who have felt the same way over the years. Once they hit an intermediate level, they felt like they were getting worse. Not because they weren’t progressing, but because they were! They were at the point where they were starting to learn the finer details, and work on higher level things. It became overwhelming, to no longer be working in a beginner state on things like “heels down, elbows bent”. Now they were learning to feel where each of the horse’s four feet were and control the rhythm, tempo, suppleness, alignment, and engagement. Suddenly they felt like beginners again, that they had more things going wrong than ever before. But the opposite was true. They just hadn’t had the awareness or body control prior to that point to notice such things, let alone correct them. I always tell my students, the more things I’m giving you to correct and focus on, the further along you are.

A lot of learning is repetition. Oftentimes we could play the same soundtrack from a lesson on repeat for an infinite number of rides. We need reminders as much as or more than we need to learn new skills. The same thing goes for our horses. They need constant reminders to carry themselves in a supple, balanced way, as it’s different from how they carry themselves at liberty in the field. Horses don’t care if they are one-sided or lean in through their turns. They just do what feels easiest in the moment. It’s up to us as humans to balance their bodies and develop them evenly. We know that this will improve their quality of life and prolong their soundness regardless of whether or not they’re being ridden, whereas the horses only do what feels good now.

So how do we progress and continue to improve as riders? How do we help

Our horses to advance? By going back to the basics, over and over again. Each time we move up a level, we go back and work on the basics. We improve the weak areas and utilize strengths. We constantly go back to the training scale, and reapply it to the new level we are at. Impulsion at First Level to perform a lengthen trot is very different from the impulsion required to passage. Just when we think we’ve mastered something, we need to go back and work on it again.

Sometimes we have to start from scratch. Any time I’ve had to rehab a horse, I’ve used it as a time to strengthen the basics. By doing this, once the horse is fit again, I find the movements we haven’t touched for months are suddenly far better than they were before the injury.

What is the best advice I can give on progressing up the levels quickly? Go slow. Constantly go back to the basics, and focus on the tiniest of details. The stronger the foundation you lay, the faster you and your horse will progress, and the less you will have to go back and fix at a later date. The simplest things aren’t always the easiest or the most exciting to work on, but they reap the biggest results.