What Kind of Trainer I Want To Be
Compassionate
I started thinking. What is the common denominator in everything I have learned so far from my horse Dancer? The answer: COMPASSION. Compassionate horse training allows me to understand better, respond better, and train better. It’s the one thread that sews its way through all my wants and desires for my horse. When I think about who and what I want to be, it’s compassionate.
Compassion is defined as sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings of others. It encompasses so much more though. Compassion is treating others like you would want to be treated in every aspect of your life. Compassion embraces patience, kindness, love, empathy, tenderness and tolerance. So how do we interact and train our horses compassionately?
I will be the first to admit that some days I fail. I’m tired, frustrated, stressed and I lose the ability to be who I want to be. But every day, I come to the barn striving to be compassionate and every day I ask myself what I can learn today to be a better trainer. I/We have to be willing to look at our own short comings and start working on them.
Knowledge
First there has to be a good foundation of training knowledge and a daily striving to make ourselves better. That’s the knowledge to be good rider… position, biomechanics, learning the aids, timing, executing movements. There is also education on body language and how to work with horses on the ground to develop better communication. Then there is education about how horses learn, how horses feel and how to train each horse according to its personality, strengths and weaknesses. Our current education system for learning how to ride and interact is based on traditions passed down but something has been lost or never covered at all. Getting an education in really working with horses to better their life without suffering is the hard gem to find. Adding the layer of understanding the science of learning is even rarer. This is the goal of Reflections From the Saddle. To open owners, trainers and handlers eyes to the vast education that has been lost.
Emotions
Sometimes our issues are all emotional. Our own emotional problems are unknowingly projected onto our horses. Whether we realize it or not. Taking the time and being willing to go deep, find our emotional baggage and deal with it can work wonders for changing our interaction and relationship with our horses. Just being willing to do this work will open your eyes to emotional reactions you have and will start the path to healing.
Many times we are self-centered. We don’t always realize it but we are narcissistic by nature. We think the world revolves around us and that every horse should bend to our will. News flash!… Horses give so much more when they are given a choice and a voice. We don’t have the right to exert our will on animals, other people or even nature. When we start to realize this, then true connection to one another, our horse and everything around us will change.
Understanding
Are you sure the horse understands? Horses don’t consciously choose to be bad! They either don’t understand what you want (confused), feel threatened or scared, can’t do what you want (painful or impossible) or haven’t learned what you are asking. In all these situations, it is us that is the problem, not the horse. I sometimes have to tell myself this everyday. It doesn’t mean I’m bad, it just means I have to learn how to let my horse succeed at what I am asking.
As we are working on getting our own life together, we can start building a real relationship with our horse. In the book “Building Our Life Together”, Frederic Pignon states that we should be more concerned that they (horses) are happy rather than that they are obeying our wishes. He goes on to say that he would rather swallow his pride in front of a large audience than force a horse to do something it is not quite ready for. Wow, think of the ramifications if we entered the show ring with that perspective. If we always put the horse first. If we always trained and rode compassionately.
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The Magic Is In The Give
One of the hardest concepts for riders to get is how to put the horse on the bit without their hands working backwards. It requires tremendous feel and command of the seat. Since the feel of riding can be really hard to describe and often using the left brain (language) to describe right brain (feel), much gets lost in translation. Add to that, different words mean different things to each rider. So, turning descriptions into feel is what makes riding so difficult. It’s often helpful to have the rider come up with a word they associate with the feel to facilitate learning and reminders.
Understanding the concepts of dressage is one step of learning. Being able to recognize it in others is the second step. The hardest step and the most important step is being able to turn those concepts into feel and use that to correctly influence the horse. (ie riding to your hands). Hearing what you should do and doing it is hard. Then feeling the correct reaction is even harder. The very essence of riding is taking what an instructor is describing and turning it into feel with their own body. Dare I say, it’s almost easy to pick up on the lingo of dressage and most riders can understand the concepts of dressage and even recognize good and bad in other riders but being a true master requires being able to do it in your own body. To be comfortable ever expanding and changing the way you use your body to further the horses training. I always encourage myself to play with feel. To try things and see what I get. To also remember that it takes many hours to turn a feel into muscle memory. For instructors, describing the feel takes not only a good understanding of biomechanics and a good command of vocabulary but also the willingness to describe it in different ways until the rider “gets it”. Its not easy. As riding is not easy. But the fundamentals of dressage all revolve around the ability to use the legs and seat to get the horse on the bit. Not the hand. If we truly want to the horse’s hind legs to step under in a relaxed swinging way, we cannot be inhibiting with our hand. But we do have to frame and recycle that energy in a way that allows the energy of the horse to flow from it’s hind legs into a beautiful “on the bit” carriage. How is the big question.
So many struggle right here for YEARS. And rightfully so, because it’s easier to use our hands. It’s quicker. Honestly when horses are struggling, using your hands can mistakingly seems like the correct answer. But, it’s not. Seemingly we see our instructors use their hands. Right? What we don’t see is the imperceptible use of their seat and legs! How they influenced the energy of the horses hind legs and back so all it took was a slight direction of the hand to have the through-ness literally go all the way through from the hocks to the nose. It takes a special person to be able to describe what their seat is doing in a way that can be incorporated into feel. To complicate matters, how the instructor learned may not be how the student needs to learn.
Kinda sounds like horse training and how each horse doesn’t learn the same. Hmm. How we must be willing to re-evaluate and change to accommodate the students whether human or horse. But I digress.
Riders can use their hands to help their seat at times but with the idea of riding to our hands. How can our legs create energy in the hind legs? What are the horse’s hind legs doing? Where are they stepping? How can I influence them and the horses back? How can my seat modify what my legs are creating? How can i use my seat to soften the back and follow the movement but also channel it? How can my hands receive that energy and help it flow to the bit?You may see riders who are afraid to use their hands in fear of doing it wrong. Don’t fall into the mistake of never receiving or channeling the energy with your hands. While the energy must first and foremost always be created with the legs and modified with the seat, the hands are supportive to that process. Only then can the hands have any correctness in receiving the energy.
The next step becomes the struggle of how to use the seat effectively without creating tension. What parts of the seat actually carry positive tension and what parts if carrying tension will stiffen the horses back? Dressage is such a balance of strength and relaxation. Contraction and softening. Firmness and grace. Like watching a ballerina dance. You know they are strong but with strength comes elegance. The body control of knowing just what muscle to contract and what area to let flow. This is dressage. And while you can describe how to hold your core, how to engage isometric contraction, how to soften your hip flexors, how to half halt and how to release, the art dances in the synchronicity of those aids.
Working with someone who has deeply studied biomechanics is a great start. Listening to them explain the individual body parts and what they are doing is a great way to understand your body in motion. Then comes the practice to not only have conscious control but precision and strength.
Take for instance core strength that can be described as the feeling of both sucking your belly and back in and at the same time pushing your belly and back out. Or others describe it as lacing the corset up. Or bearing down like you would when blowing up a balloon. It firms up your core and stablilizes your position so you can match the forces of the horse. This stability allows you to ride out to your hands and not rely on your hands for position stability or to pull the horse on the bit. Which leads me back to the topic of this blog. Finding greater self carriage and through-ness of the horse is always in the give.
I often say that the “magic happens in the give”. This is because with the right combination of aids, the horse will soften in the give and actually give you more access to their body. That’s where the magic happens. If we can align our bodies in neutral atop the horse, be stable with our front and back side the same length, bear down/engage the core, carry our own weight, keep our own stuffing, allow the movement to happen through our hip flexors, be stable enough that we can then offer our hands, ride toward them and receive the energy of the hind legs, then we are allowing the horse freedom of their body. We will be influencing the horse (with our own biomechanics) to carry themselves in a way that promotes soundness. But too often we hold. Somewhere in our body which creates tension in the horse and that tension we usually feel in our hand. And then we try and fix with our hand. Only to create more restriction and tension in our horse. And while we strive for positive muscle contraction that results in suspension and animation, we must always be able to go back to relaxation and swing. We must test, can we give and does the horse give me more access? If not, where are we not influencing the horse correctly?
So today’s blog is a challenge. Allow yourself to struggle but stay true to not using your hands to fix the connection. Take the time to learn your seat aids. Do those pilates/core exercises. Take that biomechanics course. Keep striving.
The life long process can be overwhelming. For just as we learn something new, the horse will point out yet another “thing” we must learn. Sport psychologists call it embracing the suck. The elite riders deal with it every day. Their microscope may be more tuned in and they may catch changes sooner but they, just like us, are always looking for that which to learn next.
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If you are struggling with learning to ride to your hands, please feel free to reach out to me. I too struggled with this, as did every rider at some point, and I can be of help.