I’ve never met anyone who was really a crappy rider.

It’s tension that stops us from being a good rider and tension is easily solved.

Have you ever had an experience where something happened that shook your confidence in your riding ability? That made you think you were a crap rider – even for a short period of time?

I see this all the time, when people aren’t really crap riders at all – they’re just not dealing with the tension in their bodies that makes that particular area of riding difficult if not impossible to do well.

I answered someone’s post recently who was looking for advice.  In this particular case, she was having trouble with the trot – the horse was going too fast, she was all over the shop and feeling like crap.  She definitely felt that she was a crappy rider and so clearly to me, she wasn’t crappy really.

Here’s my suggestions to her.

There’s this thing that happens when we get tense, that takes us out of a good riding seat and makes it difficult if not impossible to flow with our horse easily. It’s not that we’re a bad rider, it’s that the tension in us stops us from being a good rider.

And then there’s this thing that happens when OUR HORSE gets tense, that makes them drop their back and use their body in a jerky kind of way – that also makes it difficult if not impossible to flow with our horse easily. Then we think we can’t ride this gait, sit this trot, do this transition easily, when all it was, was tension getting in the way.

The answer is to be found in relaxing back into you and your horse’s Comfort Zone and not allowing yourself to be pulled out of your enjoyment by what others think you should be doing.

In practical terms that means enjoying the walk and getting really good at that in all kinds of ways that I won’t go into here. Then every now and again stretching yourselves to just a stride or two of trot. Or maybe make it an even smaller step – just gather your body to ask for the trot and then sit back down into a nice swinging walk without even trotting – until that gathering in both of you feels good.

Whichever you use as your first step, you do that for a as long as you need to, until that feels good, then you can expand to a little longer. And when THAT feels good, expand into a little longer again.

Pretty soon you’ll feel your horse gathering himself underneath you – WITH YOU – and you won’t have that horrible rushing, out of control kind of feeling when he trots – you’ll both be in your Comfort Zone.

Horses are meant to be fun – you should be having fun and enjoying yourselves and YOU CAN expand your Comfort Zone to the trot without stressing either of you. Not only CAN you do that, but that’s a beautiful, feel good way to be doing it that will be a wonderful foundation to EVERYthing that you do.

And above all, listen to your horse. He’s trying to tell you that he has a contribution to enjoying yourselves together – but that’s a whole new subject.

TWO THINGS PLEASE:

1. I’ve got a fabulous lesson about improving your riding seat, so that it becomes an effortlessly good riding seat. If you’d like that lesson, then email me and I’ll get it to you.

2. AND all you fabulous riders that belong to this community can help someone else who’s struggling with feeling like they’re not good enough – and tell us if you’ve ever felt like that too! I sure have!  I’m laughing, I’ll talk about it in the comments!

Today’s photo is young Sara Leitch and her rockstar horse Duke. I’ve picked this lovely photo because I’m very fond of both of them and because Sara is farrrr from being a crap rider lol!

Actually that’s three things please:

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