A few months ago I wrote a short entry about the importance of continuing your education in horses; this is a bit of a companion piece. I have made a semi-complete shift into the world of dressage, but as I own a riding school that teaches primarily hunter/equitation/jumper disciplines I find myself with jumping students (a whopping two at the moment, but that’s a post for another time). On the one hand it is very fun to get into a lesson and teach about things that I haven’t recently really put daily thought into, like automatic releases and how to teach them, or how the body angles need to adjust for a sub-optimal distance. At the same time I find myself rusty trying to remember certain exercises so I have been hitting the books (and various online sites).
Horse people like to talk a lot. When we can’t do that we also like to write a lot. Case in point: me. Other cases in point: Check out the profile pic for this entry. There are so many books published on various theories and exercises its ridiculous. You’d think training a horse is rocket science. I’ve been referring back to the small library of printed resources I’ve accumulated over the years and it reminds me of the last time I did the same studying. Now I’m refreshing my mind of exercises to do and theories to teach, but nearly nine years ago I was thumbing my way through the same books but for a different reason: I needed some inspiration and variety. I was teaching a lot, like 8-9 hours every day of back to back group lessons. Most of my students were beginners in the walk/trot/learning to canter variety, with some classes jumping cross rails to 2’. I found that instead of teaching I was instructing. I would tell them where to go, what to do, but not why. If the goal was to canter we just picked up a canter until they broke. If we wanted to jump courses we did lines. It got boring and my students progressed slowly. I needed to come up with other exercises that supported our goals without just doing rote repetition.
I love the 101 Arena/Jumping/Ground/Adulting Exercises books. Some exercises are very basic, some are excellent. At the least going to these different books gave me so many great ideas to use rather than just around and around we go. There’s a million resources out there that are so easily available; use them.