Riding

To be a successful rider, you must have an independent seat. This is the result of a combination of suppleness and stability and can be attained by staying fit and by performing focused exercises to improve the flexibility of your joints. Supple, flexible joints allow you to move in rhythm with your horse. This improves … Read more

Horseback riding is a lot of coordination, when you think about it. Independently, our hands and legs do a lot of work to keep our horses balanced, straight, and moving at the correct pace–and even tempo! To effectively use our hands and legs independently, we must be able to utilize them together in harmony. While … Read more

The rider’s legs in horseback riding are perhaps our greatest tools for directing horses well. Working in tandem with our seat and hands, our legs influence not only the pace, tempo, and gait of our horses, but also their direction. Today we will explore the role of our legs in horseback riding, i.e. what to … Read more

We’ve all been there. You have been having riding lessons since you were tiny, you regularly ride out with the local riding school or instructor, or maybe you are lucky enough to borrow a friend’s horse. You know everything there is to know about horses, you know you are responsible enough to own one – … Read more

Choosing a riding instructor is perhaps the most impactful decision you will make when taking up horseback riding. Whether you are new or returning to the sport, finding the right fit can be the difference between fulfillment and growth and losing interest altogether. Having ridden under some stellar and some not-so-stellar instructors, I’m here to … Read more

It can be difficult to understand all of the different terminology that applies to horsemanship. One of the most confusing topics is horse gaits. In this article, we briefly explain the several different groups of gaits and provide resources to help you sound like an old hand when speaking of horses’ gaits. Read on to … Read more

The most important thing to know about riding horse is not the mechanics. It’s the relationship. It’s getting a feel for how a horse moves and what those movements mean. It’s gaining an understanding of the body language, and it’s learning how to use your own body language to communicate with the horse. This is … Read more

If you’ve only ever ridden with the saddle, you don’t actually know how to ride. That may seem like a dramatic statement, but there is a huge difference between learning how to ride with the saddle and learning how to ride with just a horse. When you ride bareback you are in close contact with … Read more

There are lots of articles online that give step-by-step instructions on how to canter a horse for the first time, and quite frankly they all read like trigonometry texts to me. I believe all of these articles are geared toward working with lesson horses or stable horses in an arena environment, and that is just … Read more