Send us your feedback! It isn’t riding in ‘mistake prevention mode’ and keeping the horse’s head down by whatever means. But it is the ‘human trump card’ in the ‘got it/lost it’ game that each rider learns (we hope) to play with her horse. This concept suggests a viable ‘it’ that the rider wants to get back to - but this is not a foregone conclusion. This involves water going through the horse’s hoses (from his hind legs over his top line) without being dissipated, deadened or deviated, and a ri...
Jan 24, 2021•22 min
Send us your feedback! Half halts are an emergent property of good biomechanics. The rider. needs firstly to realise that she needs to intervene to ‘lead the dance’ and not just get carried away on the horse’s ‘magical mystery tour’. This won’t happen until she has a ‘reference feeling’ and makes comparisons between that and the feeling she’s actually getting. This involves the TOTE model - Test, Operation, Test, Exit. With more skills, she makes smaller interventions more often. Also, it helps ...
Jan 18, 2021•24 min
Send us your feedback! Let’s imagine that you and I stand opposite each other and play a game of catch with a tennis ball, allowing it to bounce once in each throw. We are doing this in a rhythm, and not trying to catch each other out. But if I (sneakily) substitute a bean bag, that would be the end of the game. Or I might (sneakily) substitute a boingy ball, and the game would speed up. This is a metaphor for rising trot, which we want to be a ‘tennis ball game’ with the rider ‘calling the shot...
Jan 10, 2021•25 min
Send us your feedback! I have been accused of terminal rising trot - but time invested here is so worthwhile - it’s the ‘gold dust’ skill. I offer some strategies to help your hollow back or round back, in both the rise and sit, keeping your knee in the same place and your foot back under you. Recent research has shown that it does indeed help your horse to sit with the inside hind leg, and that it’s actually his outside hind leg that works harder on a circle, not his inside one. I also offer st...
Jan 03, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 37
Send us your feedback! We use a full length mirror to get really forensic about rising trot mechanism, showing you how to differentiate movement in your hip joint from movement in your mid back. This allows you to mimic the movements rising trot and gives you clarity about the movements you need to avoid. Type A and type B horses respond very differently to the rider who does the ’itsy bitsy rise’, but all horses respond the same way to the rider who elongates her front in the rise. There’s a qu...
Dec 20, 2020•22 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Send us your feedback! I suggest some metaphorical MRs to reduce the ‘sting’ of your less-than-stellar rides. Realise too that thinking ‘What if?…’ is a mental rehearsal, and if the rehearsal ends with you in a ‘black hole’ you are probably more scared of the difficult emotions it generates than you are of hitting the ground. Realise that you can take sensible precautions before you get on - perhaps by doing some ground work. This doesn’t mean that you’re scared, it simply means that you’re sens...
Dec 18, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Send us your feedback! How neurons that fire together wire together, in both real and imagined practice. We do mental rehearsals of personal bests, asking ‘What’s the difference that made the difference?’. We also rehearse fixing a pattern when it goes wrong, since that’s the skill you need to speed up the phase of ‘conscious competence’. I suggest some more creative uses of MR to find ways around the blocks to your progress....
Dec 07, 2020•25 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Send us your feedback! Research on mental rehearsal has encompassed dart throwing, piano playing, and many other skills, often reporting improvements in skill that surpass actual practice. Focussing in the effect of a movement works better than focussing on the movement itself, and the level of detail you can produce in your rehearsal says a lot about your actual skill level. There are a few ‘health warnings’ about ways of (perhaps inadvertantly) doing rehearsals that are not helpful....
Nov 30, 2020•25 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Send us your feedback! Research on mental rehearsal has encompassed dart throwing, piano playing, and many other skills, often reporting improvements in skill that surpass actual practice. Focussing in the effect of a movement works better than focussing on the movement itself, and the level of detail you can produce in your rehearsal says a lot about your actual skill level. There are a few ‘health warnings’ about ways of (perhaps inadvertantly) doing rehearsals that are not helpful....
Nov 24, 2020•26 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Send us your feedback! When pupils are ‘going through the motions’ of getting the horse to go, teachers tend to ‘go through the motions’ as well - or to get really impatient. Staying patient requires the coach to maintain and identity/behaviour separation for the rider, realising that she might have good skills in other fields. Ideally, the coach ‘tunes’ herself, getting centred and present, to help her tune the rider who then tunes the horse. The coach is a role model for the rider. The story o...
Nov 13, 2020•25 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Send us your feedback! In riding, negative expectations so often become the reality (as in ‘I hope we don’t stop at the ditch!…’). When things are going well you have to ‘make it again, make it again’ - not stop doing it - and you can’t even afford to take time out and congratulate yourself! Hoping something good will happen is very different to expecting it to happen, and when it comes to impulsion, many riders set themselves up to ensure that it won’t happen. Naive teachers feed this rider lot...
Nov 04, 2020•21 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Send us your feedback! Most riders give repeated leg aids that actually train the horse to be dead to their leg. If you have to kick to get each step of walk, how are you ever going to ride a canter pirouette? To be an effective rider, you have to believe that you have the right to be up there, being the brains of the rider/horse partnership, and being the leader your horse really needs. This requires self believe, good technique for giving a leg aid, a lot of conscious attention, and the ‘kick,...
Oct 26, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Send us your feedback! Trainers will always be prejudiced against the toolkits they don’t understand, can’t be bothered with, or do so brilliantly (and easily) that they fail to recognise their brilliance. This complicates the ‘map battles’ between the proponents of the various toolkits. It pays to ‘outframe’ the zero toolkit to include saddlery, farriery, bodywork etc. - the supporting arts that help your horse to not be one of the ‘walking wounded’ who doesn’t limp, but is not physically robus...
Oct 18, 2020•22 min
Send us your feedback! How proponents of the 3 toolkits interact like the proverbial 3 blind men with the elephant. More on the Zero toolkit, overshadowing, and the transition from ground work to riding. Being strong in one of the ‘maps’ of riding and training makes up for weaknesses in the other ‘maps’ - and also allows trainers to negate the other maps. Trainers often attribute their skill to one of the toolkits, not realising that they are also strong in a different one. Incongruent riding ha...
Oct 04, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Send us your feedback! On ‘the map is not the territory’, even though riders and trainers the world over act as if it is - and go so far as to ‘eat the menu’! If a rider, vet, physio, saddler and farrier were all looking at a tricky horse, each would see a different problem within their area of expertise. We all see what we are looking for, informed by the ‘maps’ or internal representations that we have developed over years, and we tend to think that the problem we perceive is the one and only p...
Sep 30, 2020•21 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Send us your feedback! So much of riding is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get run away with from the moment you decide you’re being run away with… so we review how rider ‘lose it’ through the model of polyvagal theory. All of your insecurities are likely to be triggered when you buy a new horse, who may offer challenges that are on the limit of your skills (do you remember the flow channel, where these stay in balance over time?). The pitfalls are many, and when you buy a schoolmaster, a lot d...
Sep 20, 2020•23 min
Send us your feedback! The patterns in the pupil’s body are part of this, and we have both the ‘foetal crouch’ and the much more common ‘Landau response’, where the rider pushes down into the stirrups, hollows her back, stretches up and stops breathing (like a horse in ‘arrest’). But in addition, is the rider’s mental/emotional state more ‘fight or flight-ish’ or ‘freeze and fold-ish’?. The latter riders, who are disengaged, and a bit floppy, are lacking authority and boundaries. Teaching author...
Sep 04, 2020•21 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Send us your feedback! Imagine yourself as a mouse in a house where there is cheese available on the opposite side of the room to your mouse hole. But there is also a cat. Which is more real to you, the reward, or the risk? Your perception of one might far out way your perception of the other. Or you might not care about either, or you might be aware of both. This is the most stressful situation, and it mirrors wanting to ride, but also being nervous. Skilled, resilient riders can both generate ...
Aug 11, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Send us your feedback! I learnt many years ago that my observations just before a lesson were a more accurate risk assessment than some riders made before mounting. But my words of caution did not stop them getting on - and then remaining on for a very short time! The hypervigilant horse paired with a hypervigilant rider can really wind each other up, and keeping the horse’s attention can be vital. We all know about ‘rest and digest’ and ‘fight or flight’, but research has shown that there is ac...
Jul 27, 2020•23 min
Send us your feedback! Many riders, epecially those with a fixed mindset struggle on alone, thinking they’re the only one who doesn’t ‘get it’, but this is not true. Dressage as ‘the passionate pursuit of perfection by the obsessively imperfect’. Many riders confuse their behaviour with their identity, so ‘I rode a bad transition’ soon becomes, ‘I’m a bad rider’ which has the implication of ‘I’m a bad person.’ This can become an emotional roller coaster, and fear compounds it, wether it’s fear o...
Jul 20, 2020•21 min
Send us your feedback! Elite riders have different ways of dealing with the disconnect between the knowledge they have in language, and the skills they have as ‘feelages’. Their chosen tactic has a huge bearing on how they teach! Also, there is a massive difference between a fixed mindset (‘You’ve either got it or you haven’t) and a growth mindset (‘The harder I work the smarter I get’). The latter creates a much more supportive learning environment. A ‘culturescape’ will not change until a lot ...
Jul 14, 2020•22 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Send us your feedback! How we get language and feelings to connect.
Jul 07, 2020•22 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Send us your feedback! The debate between ‘thighs on’ and ‘thighs off’. The coach as a tour guide who needs to be able to describe the journey her pupil is taking. My made up story about how ‘take your thighs off the saddle’ took over from ‘grip with your knees’, and became the new doctrine. How each school of thought has one half of the truth expressed very poorly in language. What really happens is so paradoxical that it’s hard to wrap your brain around it…. but it’s something your muscles can...
Jun 28, 2020•21 min
Send us your feedback! We deconstruct the halt to walk transition, considering the horse who really wants to hollow his back. When the rider keeps her front vertical and short, she can influence the length of the horse’s underneath . The key to this is an image: if the rider imagines a carousel pole running from her head vertically down to the horse’s belly, and refuses to let it deform and/or lean back, she can prevent the equivalent line of muscle in the horse from elongating. She then needs t...
Jun 21, 2020•20 min
Send us your feedback! Skilled riders appear to do so little whilst having a huge effect on the horse’s posture and movement. We add the idea of ‘suction’ to bearing down and ‘kneeling’, and describe how the rider effectively moulds the horse’s body into a form. But what she’s really moulding is his energy, and her relationship to this is a big key.
Jun 14, 2020•22 min
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Jun 07, 2020•21 min
Send us your feedback! Your instincts can easily lead you astray when riding, wether that’s pushing hard into the stirrups, ‘popping up’, or growing too tall. These are all symptoms of the ‘Landau Response’, which defines many rider’s instinctive reaction to a ‘Yikes!’ moment, and also to downward transitions. This podcast offers more distinctions about feeling and controlling the movement of your seat bones, and riding walk to halt transitions without falling prey to the ‘waterski/motorboat’ sy...
May 31, 2020•22 min
Send us your feedback! Newton’s third law of motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) affects the relationship between your feet and seat bones. How to find ‘just right’ for the tone in the underneath of the box, and the appropriate clarity for your seat bones, so you neither ‘pop them up’ nor have a pair of ‘stiletto heels’. Once you find ‘just right’ you can control the speed of their movement - and this controls the speed of your horse’s legs....
May 24, 2020•21 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Send us your feedback! What is flow and what difference does it make to elite performance.
May 17, 2020•22 min
Send us your feedback! How to get rid of the tyranny of the voice inside your head and create for yourself the best internal coach!
May 14, 2020•22 min•Season 1Ep. 11
