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Dedicating time to improving ourselves as riders is just as important as training our horses. After all, only once the rider is in the right place, in mind and body, can they be in a position to help their horse and achieve their equestrian dreams.
Keep reading to learn more about the key traits and habits all riders need to be the best partner for their horse.
Building the Rider’s Physical Foundation
Equestrians know there is more to riding than sitting there. This sport takes balance, strength, muscle coordination, and lots of skill to look effortless. In addition to power and stamina, the rider must communicate with a moving horse by holding a specific position and timing their aids precisely.
It's a lot for one person to do, however, with attention to the physical nature of the sport and time put into practicing out of the saddle, riders can become one with their horse.
Improve Rider Fitness
Riding is a sport that takes more strength, muscle coordination, and endurance than most people realize. After riding for the first time, many beginner riders feel sore in muscles they never knew they had!
Riding a couple of times a week is not enough to build the strength, flexibility, and muscular coordination needed to excel on a horse. You should aim to intersperse days on the horse with strength, cardiovascular, and flexibility workouts.
Some beneficial workouts for equestrians include:
Cardiovascular: To increase your stamina in the saddle and allow you to work for longer periods of time without tiring.
Popular cardio workouts include:
Running
Biking
Skiing
Swimming
Strength: To increase stability, balance, and ability to hold your position in the saddle and decrease your risk of injury.
Popular strength workouts include:
Weight Lifting
Pilates
Flexibility, Balance, and Muscle Coordination: To increase your ability to move in the saddle without losing your balance and to communicate with the horse using subtle aids.
Popular workouts for flexibility, balance, and muscle coordination include:
Yoga (a favorite of mine as it hits all the above areas!)
Pilates
Tai Chi
Perfect Rider Position
Imagine for a minute you are carrying a child on your shoulders. Perhaps you are at Disneyland and they got tired running from ride to ride and needed a rest. However, still enthralled by the sight and sounds they can't help but twist and lean in all directions trying to take it all in. Constantly being pushed off balance by their movement, you quickly tire and struggle to find your footing under the ever-shifting load.
Sounds unpleasant, right? Yet, this is exactly what many of us put our horses through with a sloppy position.
The classical seat is the guiding framework for riders who want to minimize their burden on the horse and communicate effortlessly.
The classical seat is a complicated topic with whole books dedicated to the practice, however, the guiding principles you should keep in mind when you ride include:
Alignment: A straight line can be drawn from through the head, shoulder, hip, and heel. This balances the rider over the horse's center of gravity.
Three-point contact: The rider sits with weight even distributed on the two seat bones and the crotch so they can easily use their seat to communicate with the horse.
Head and Shoulders: Shoulders should be open and head up, looking in the direction of movement.
Legs: The thighs should have maximum contact with the saddle to help distribute weight and cue the horse.
Feet: Toes should be pointed forward to help the rest of the leg lie flat.
Hands: Hands should be quiet and maintain light, consistent contact with the mouth.
The hallmark of the classical seat is stillness. The rider should cue the horse invisibly so that to the onlooker it appears as though they are doing nothing at all. Only then can the horse move freely without being hindered by their rider.
Develop Feel
Many of us aim to ride with precision. However, our horses cannot respond instantly to our cues if they are done out of time with their movement. The only way to create a seamless partnership between horse and rider is to develop feel.
Feel is the rider's ability to sense where every part of the horse's body is and how it’s moving without needing to look. A rider who constantly looks down or relies on a ground person for guidance disrupts the horse's movement and harmony. Developing feel allows you to ride with confidence, precision, and true connection.
Feel allows the rider to...
Align their aids to the horse's footfalls
Feel irregularities and lamenesses in the gaits
Know which diagonal or lead they are on without looking down
Know if the horse is working over their back and bending correctly
Execute proper lateral movements
The only way to develop feel is to ride a lot and to ride many different horses so you can begin to recognize what every movement of the horse feels like.
To practice, close your eyes while you ride (when safe to do so). This will allow you to feel the movements of the horse easier. Have someone on the ground to talk you through what you are feeling. Then try counting footfalls to learn what it feels like when each leg moves. Ride your horse as they bend/ lower their head/ get stiff/ collect, so you recognize it when feel it (even if you can't see it).
Mindset Mastery
Many riders underestimate the impact their mindset has on their performance. Even with physical strength and a solid seat, a negative or unfocused mindset can hold you back from reaching your full potential. The good news? Just like physical fitness, mental fitness is a skill you can train and strengthen with practice.
Use Positive Self-Talk
What we repeatedly tell ourselves defines what we think is possible. If we constantly tell ourselves that we’re not good riders or that our horse isn’t capable, those negative thoughts will start to feel true. But the opposite is also correct: if we believe in our abilities and trust in our horse, we open the door to achieving our dreams.
It's not always easy to change your perception of your riding (or yourself for that matter!) However, understanding how negative thoughts impact your life and recognizing when you are getting down on yourself is an important first step.
Luckily, changing your perception of yourself is simple, it just takes repetition and dedication to not dwelling on negative thoughts.
To flip the script try...
Positive "I am" statements:
When you hear a negative thought, turn it into a positive "I am" statement. For instance, when you hear yourself saying "I'll never sit the trot" say "I am great at sitting the trot. It's easy."
Try to catch yourself every time you hear a negative thought pop up and, with consistency, soon you will notice that you are down on yourself less often and the things that once felt difficult are easier.
Visualization:
Visualization is another powerful tool to help you transform your riding. Take a couple of minutes a day to vividly imagine exactly what you want your ride or training session to look like.
For instance, if you want to ride a perfect dressage test, imagine yourself riding every movement effortlessly. If you want to be able to catch your horse from the field without them running away, picture that too. Visualization helps you train your brain to expect the outcome, increasing your motivation, focus, and ability to get the job done.
Set Goals and Plan
It's common knowledge that "if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there." Planning provides you with a vision for your goals and a roadmap to achieve them, helping you avoid wasting time taking detours and backtracking.
Planning doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Start by grabbing a journal and jotting down (even in just one sentence) where you’d like to be with your horse in one month, by the end of the year, and in five years. You can break your goals into categories that suit your focus—like dressage, trail riding, or groundwork.
Break down each goal into small steps. For example, if you want to master the shoulder-in, you might start with getting your horse to move forward willingly, bend on a circle, and respond to your seat aids.
Each time you go out to the barn, pick a few things to incorporate into your session. A plan will help steady progress while giving you a system to troubleshoot if you hit a roadblock or need to revisit earlier steps.
Cultivate Mental Resilience
Horseback riding is a sport that poses a unique problem: the horse has a mind of its own and what they want is not always what we want. You could have your ride planned perfectly, be prepared, and still show up at the barn to a horse who is just not into it today.
It's happened to us all: we are prepared to have a great ride and our normally supple horse is stiff or they don't want to trot, or else we are completely off our game. These rides can be frustrating and without good mental resilience and emotional control, we can easily become upset and resort to force with our horses.
Being agile and mentally resilient will help you adapt to these circumstances so these speed bumps don't turn into mountains.
Improve mental resilience by...
Setting Realistic Goal
Practicing Optimism
Keeping a Mindfulness Journal
Meditating
Trying Yoga
Don't let yourself get hung up on one bad ride (or even two or three!) Instead focus on what you can control: your reaction to the ride! Stay positive and always keep the horse's needs in mind.
Understanding Your Horse
At the heart of every great rider is a deep understanding of and empathy for the horse. After all, without the horse, there would be no rider.
Unfortunately, too many riders today rely on harsh aids, punishment, or poor equitation—often out of laziness, lack of knowledge, or disregard for the horse's well-being. However, every rider should recognize that the horse is a living being that needs to be trained with understanding, patience, and knowledge.
Learn The Horse's Language
Horses are social animals with a nearly silent language. Tiny swishes of their tails, gestures of their body, and minute facial expressions convey a wide range of emotions. Humans often do not pick up on this delicate language until the horse is screaming. This often looks like the horse kicking out, biting, spooking, or performing other vices. However, good riding is founded on seamless communication between horse and rider.
Therefore, riders need to learn their language. We need to recognize the subtle signs of pain, discomfort, and frustration before they escalate.
A swishing tail is often an early sign of resistance under saddle
Every horse is different, but the early signs of confusion and discomfort often manifest as:
Swishing of the tail
Raising a leg
Tension around the mouth or eye (creating a tented look of the eyelid)
Pinned ears
Resistance
Opening of the mouth (if the horse has a bit)
Raised head and wide eyes
Stiffness and tension throughout the body
Once you are able to recognize these signs, you can take action quickly to make your horse more comfortable. Perhaps the girth is too tight. There could be something spooking them in the distance. Maybe your horse is confused and you need to be clearer with your aids. This way your horse can learn to trust you and your partnership, allowing you to work better together.
Try Positive Reinforcement Training
For centuries, riders used negative reinforcement to train horses (today this is often called natural horsemanship). While positive reinforcement has been used with other animals for decades, it has only recently gained traction in the equestrian world. Yet, this approach has the potential to transform how we train horses and revolutionize our riding.
Positive reinforcement focuses on rewarding desired behaviors with something pleasant. For example, rather than just releasing leg pressure when a horse moves forward, you use a marker signal (like a click or verbal cue) to let the horse know they did the right thing, followed by a reward (like a treat or a scratch).
Instead of applying aversive stimuli until they comply (like with natural horsemanship), positive reinforcement breaks down complex behaviors into small easy-to-understand pieces, making it more enjoyable for the horse to learn.
For instance, to teach a horse to trot...
Start on the ground with a target for the horse to follow.
Walk next to the horse with the target and say "trot." Jog to encourage the horse to trot.
After they take a step of trot, give the marker signal and a reward.
Once they clearly understand "trot" means to pick up a trot, start teaching it under saddle.
Pair a small squeeze with the legs with the word "trot." Mark and reward when they pick up the trot.
Eventually, you can stop using the word and only use your legs and you'll have a horse that learned to trot with positive reinforcement!
Unlike traditional methods that often rely on pressure, force, or punishment to coerce the horse to comply, positive reinforcement encourages the horse to become an engaged and willing participant in their training.
Learn more about positive reinforcement here.
Expand Your Expertise
The best riders are lifelong learners. Even after reaching your goals, the journey doesn’t stop—there’s always more to discover. Reading books, attending clinics, taking lessons and online courses are all great ways to expand your knowledge. Horseback riding is not just a sport; it is an art form that takes a lifetime to master. Great riders embrace the fact that they’ll never know everything and remain eager to learn more.
Dive deep into a specialty. Learn everything you can. Then explore another. Try a new discipline. Study positive reinforcement. Delve into horse husbandry. Read a historic book by a classical riding master. Take a course from an instructor halfway across the world.
Keep learning. Keep growing. Stay curious. Be open to new techniques that could better suit your horse, spark a lightbulb moment, or help you conquer a challenge. The path to mastery is never-ending—and that’s the beauty of it.
Great riders know they are the weakest link in their partnership with their horse and strive to always improve themselves. After all, the horse already knows how to be a horse it is we who need to learn how to communicate in a way that is intuitive to them. That requires strength, discipline, the right attitude, and a wealth of knowledge. And of course the wellbeing of the horse at the forefront. Always.
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