The Checklist
One of the things that I hear from students fairly frequently is that they are not always sure what to work on in any given ride. Often, they will stick with the exercises we worked on in our last lesson, and while I try to structure lessons so that folks have an idea of what to keep working on, I still find that the assessment part of the ride may not happen, or we may not pay good attention to our findings to structure the rest of the ride. Have you ever gone into a ride with a plan and then tried valiantly to stick to it when you clearly should have changed course according to how things were going that way? (RAISES HAND AND WAVES IT WILDLY.) Yeah, I figured you might say that.
Please let me note here and now and burn it into your brain: everything that I talk about is something that I also a) have struggled with, b) currently struggle with, and/or c) think I’m done struggling with but really am not. Me writing these things down is also a slightly desperate attempt to continue hammering them into my brain.
Anyways, I digress. I want to share a practical tool with you that might help you determine how to structure your ride based on what you’re feeling as you warm up your horse.
With virtually every horse I ride, I begin my ride by going down a checklist.
Are you in front of my leg?
Are you on my seat - in other words, can I stop or slow down?
Can you move away from my left leg and right leg?
Can you connect to my right rein and my left rein (in other words, when I add pressure on the bit, does the horse yield forward/downward/sideways to the connection)?
I will ask these questions first in walk, and then in trot and canter (varying expectations depending on the experience of the horse). If a horse tends to be a bit more behind the leg, I might ask these questions more in the trot and canter, rather than shutting down the walk. If they have more go than whoa, it might be helpful to first establish that they are soft to my lateral bending aids in the walk before proceeding onwards. Checking out these questions will help you learn where your horse is on any given day and what you need to work on that day. It also keeps us away from the trap of riding the horse we had yesterday instead of the horse who is showing up today; in other words, riding the horse we think we should have instead of the horse we actually have. This can be especially helpful for horses we ride frequently. A helpful exercise for me is pretending that I have never ridden the horse before. This keeps me from doing the same things I always do and allows me to better see the areas where we need more work.
For instance, here are some exercises that may be helpful if your horse is answering “no” or “not really” to any of these questions:
Are you in front of my leg? Upward transitions between gaits and within the gait, upward transitions skipping a gait, taking your legs away very deliberately and asking the horse to maintain the gait, using a very light leg to ask for more forward
Are you on my seat (in other words, can I stop or slow down?)? Downward transitions between gaits and within the gait, uberstreichen of both reins
Can you move away from my left/right leg? Turns on the forehand, spiraling out on a circle, haunches in, haunches out, shoulder in, turns on the haunches
Can you connect to my right/left rein? Finding a soft opening or leading inside rein to ask the horse move forwards/downwards/sideways to the rein while spiraling away from the inside leg at walk and trot (and canter for advanced horses), moving back to a ten meter circle with that degree of softness if when you touch the rein, the horse does not soften and connect
These questions and the answers to them really do help me structure each ride. The beautiful thing about them is they easily scale to horses of different levels. And when the answers are all positive, that is a good indication that today is a great day to start learning something a bit new or push for a new bit of progress. What’s more, when things seem challenging but it’s hard to put a finger on what’s going on, the checklist can help you figure it out!