Teaching Takeaways

Our horse can’t advance forward in functional movement, with functional posture, if we are pulling on the reins.

I’ve touched on this topic before: the cohesiveness of your professionals. It is essential that the professionals you choose can communicate effectively, can disagree respectfully, are open minded enough to realize that they don’t know everything, and they want to continue learning. If your professionals are easily offended, defensive if another professional disagrees with them, doesn’t continue their education, or can’t respect the experience/education of another profession

There is no guidebook because the answer when finding the right path is, “It depends”.

How do we refeed a starving horse? Carefully. You can literally kill then with kindness. Google refeeding syndrome. Giving a starving horse too much too fast can cause organ failure. So what did I do?

Favorite Things Friday

May Master Zoom

Having horses is expensive. Most of us try to save where we can. Investing in good equipment and proper care is important but expensive. I have a few musts for horses leaving my program. It’s to keep the owner and horse on the best track forward in their relationship. Some owners head the advice. Some don’t. The ones that don’t usually end up with far more problems.

Don’t train weakness. I don’t believe any of us intentionally do this but by not riding with intention we inadvertently do it. So what does unintentionally training weakness look like? Here are some phrases you may find yourself using when you unintentionally train weakness.

If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend that you do. You will look at your horse differently.

I just spent two fabulous days learning! I’m super exhausted so this will be short. But expect some detailed posts coming up as I recover from surgery.

They talk to us. We need to be more educated listeners.

March Recording and April Zoom info

The expense of tack. It’s easy to buy cheap. But it isn’t always what is best for your horse. We are asking our horses to do a job they were not built for. It is, therefore, our job to keep them comfortable.

Have a horse with a bad experience? Hard to load? Have a horse you have to force in and slam the door?

Our horses are stoic creatures. They will function through discomfort because they don’t feel they have a way out. This is called Learned Helplessness. The discomfort can come from handler, rider, tack, feet, body issues, etc. The horse will shut down and do the work just to get through. We then acted surprised when they blow up or have behavior issues. Pay attention to the small indicators. Tension, fascial expression, body language, evasions, spooking, worry, refusing to en

Don’t skip the body work

Video for Masters Level Subscribers

Masters video

Anyone can ride a crooked horse. Anyone can ride a horse fast. It takes skill to ride a horse and help them remain straight and balanced. It takes skill to ride a horse in true collection and have an adjustable horse that you can ride forward or bring back.