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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 of individuals share their experience of struggle - making this mutual rather than individual knowledge. There’s power in numbers!

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How we get language and feelings to connect.

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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 potentially do.

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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
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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 to maintain this in the next step, and the next step…but there are many mistakes that limit this profound degree of influence. When elite riders ride the transition from piaffe to passage they often topple back just like less experienced riders do in the halt to walk transition. Strength and skill and understanding build over time

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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.

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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’ syndrome.

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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.

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What is flow and what difference does it make to elite performance.

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How to get rid of the tyranny of the voice inside your head and create for yourself the best internal coach!