You know the feeling. You’re in your lesson, your horse is cosplaying as Valegro, and everything seems to just work. You leave thinking, finally – I’ve got it. Then you get home… and suddenly you’re riding a giraffe, and your once-perfect circles are now wobbly squares.
So what changed? And more importantly – is it you?
Your Environment
The first thing that’s likely different about your lesson is your environment. You’ve probably boxed up or hacked to a dedicated location to focus and improve. Chances are the arena’s bigger than your one at home (if you’re lucky enough to have access to one), the footing is better, and overall you and your horse have travelled there for the sole purpose of this lesson.
Now consider that this is effectively a ‘workplace’ for you both – akin to going to the office. When you are in a dedicated workspace, your brain switches into ‘focus mode’, and a very similar thing happens with your horse too. Then, when you return home, you may associate this familiar location with comfort, perhaps monotony and, lets face it, a little bit of laziness. It’s a subconscious effect, but its impacts are very real.
Your Instructor
Now I will preface this section by saying we as riders would be nowhere without our fabulous instructors, however not everyone’s learning styles will gel with every instructor’s teaching styles.
Some instructors use exercise-based teaching – extravagant pole exercises and drills to achieve their desired result, which tends to work for many riders who have a tendency to get stuck in their own heads. If this sounds like you, it’s likely because your instructor has skilfully curated an exercise that both encourages the horse to go correctly (whether that be through bending to create softness, or raised poles to encourage engagement), and is complex enough that your mind is occupied and you aren’t overthinking what you’re doing.
Another teaching style that works similarly to this one is instruction-based teaching -the ‘do this, do that’ style that tells you when you pull and when to kick and when to circle, but doesn’t take the time to explain the ‘why’. In the moment, this will feel fabulous. You’ll be riding like a pro and your horse will be going like one, and this will continue to work for you when you get home if you’re a logical person who enjoys having a system – you memorise what you need to do and when you need to do it until it becomes second nature.
Where both of these methods fall short is that, for riders (like myself) who need to understand the ‘why’, once you get home and you haven’t got that extra pair of eyes analysing and correcting your every move, everything falls apart. It felt so easy in the lesson, but now you feel, quite frankly, rather useless. This comes down to what we all rather vaguely refer to as ‘feel’. It comes more naturally to some people than to others, but if you’re reading this in despair because you don’t have the coveted ‘feel’, worry not – it is absolutely a learnable and teachable skill, and in fact most instructors will be able to break components of it down for you if you explain that you’re struggling to implement what you’ve learnt in lessons at home, and (humbly) ask them why they’re telling you to do certain things.
You
Now we ask the dreaded question – are you the problem? The unfortunate answer is that you may well be. Maybe you concentrated super hard in the lesson because you didn’t want to throw 50 quid away. Maybe you physically worked yourself well beyond the point of discomfort because you’re a teensy bit scared of your instructor. Maybe you just wanted to be the best in the group. But whatever the reason, you probably had more motivation to try your absolute hardest than you would in the rain at home, or after a hard days work, or when you know that no-one’s watching. And, simple as it sounds, these are all very real and very valid reasons for not giving 100% – you’re turning up consistently, and that’s what counts.
So maybe, next time you’re struggling with your leg yields and ready to sack it all in, just take a moment. Cut yourself some slack and think, what would my instructor say, and why? And then, simply try again.
Stuck in the Saddle 