The horse as a mirror

I want to start with you rather than with him, because that's where this actually starts.

There's a guide on this site about reading your horse: what he's telling you about himself, and how to hear it. This is the other direction. What he's telling you about you, which is more than most riders would like, and considerably more useful.

He isn't sensing anything. He's just very close to you

People sometimes describe this as a horse sensing what you feel, and I try not to put it that way. It makes it sound like a gift some horses have and some don't.

I don't need him to sense anything. You're sitting on his back. Your weight goes down through his spine, your legs are against his ribs, and your hands are joined to his mouth by two thin pieces of leather. When your ribcage locks up, he's inside it. He isn't reading your mind, he's feeling your body at close range for an hour, and there's nothing mystical about that.

The breath you're holding

The single thing I say most often from the ground is "breathe".

Watch a rider approach something she isn't sure about. A corner where he spooked once, a canter transition, a line of poles. Three or four strides out, the breath stops. She doesn't decide to do it and she almost never knows it happened.

A held breath isn't a small thing to sit on. It fixes the ribcage, which stiffens the back and hardens the arms, so the whole rider becomes one solid object at the exact moment the horse needed her to stay soft. He does what horses do with a rider who's turned to wood. He shortens, or quickens, or drifts off the line.

And then she tells me he doesn't like that corner.

The interesting part isn't that he noticed. It's that I can see it from twenty metres away and she can't feel it from the inside. Her own body, invisible to her, which is this whole subject in miniature.

So I make people count strides out loud, or talk to me on the approach. Not because the counting matters. You can't hold your breath and talk at the same time, and the horse very often changes before the rider believes he has.

Two hands doing two different jobs

Almost everybody is stronger on one side. That isn't a fault, it's how people are built.

On a horse it shows up as one rein carried a fraction shorter than the other, one elbow that locks while the other stays elastic, one shoulder slightly ahead of its partner through every turn. None of it is dramatic. All of it is constant.

What he does about it is fall in one way and drop the contact the other, or stay soft on one rein and brace against the second. Which the rider reports, entirely honestly, as a horse who's stiff to the right.

He may well be. Horses are genuinely one-sided too, and I'm not arguing that every crookedness belongs to the rider. What I notice is which half gets investigated. His stiffness gets a plan and some exercises. Hers is rarely mentioned, and it's riding around on top of the thing it's being blamed for.

You can't see your own hands. That isn't a character flaw, it's anatomy.

The day you arrived carrying something else

Everybody has driven to the yard cross about something that had nothing to do with the horse.

You get on with your jaw set and your hands quick, because you have an hour and you intend to use it. He braces. You ride a worse version of everything you normally ride, and you go home crosser than you came, now with the horse added to the list.

It isn't my place to tell anybody how to manage their day, so I'll stay with what I can see from the ground. A rider in a hurry gives short aids and a fast hand, in a body that has already decided how the ride will go. That produces a tight horse on more or less every horse I've taught on. Not because he understands that your week has been awful. Because being in a hurry has a shape, and he's sitting underneath it.

The shape it takes is nearly always the same, and the warm-up is where it shows first. A rider carrying a frustrated day at work, or something going on at home, gets on and skips it. The reins come shorter straight away. The aids get louder. The whole ride turns into telling rather than asking, and he gets tense and runs short of patience, which is fair enough, because so has she.

Then the horse gets the blame. That's the part worth sitting with, because the same rider on any other day would have spotted herself doing every bit of it. Nobody is being dim. You simply can't see your own hands from up there.

So the useful thing isn't to arrive serene. It's to know that the five minutes before you get on are worth more than the last five of the session, and that a day spent walking on a long rein isn't a wasted day. If it isn't the day for schooling, do something else. You get the ride back on Thursday instead of spending Thursday undoing this one.

Asking three ways and calling him inconsistent

"He's so inconsistent" is among the commonest sentences said to me, and it's very rarely what's going on.

Take a canter transition across one week.

On Monday she asks with an outside leg and a squeeze, sitting tall, and gets a clean strike-off. On Wednesday she's tired, so the ask is a bigger leg, a click, and a slight lean forward. On Saturday there are people watching, so it's leg, click, lean, and a hand that shortens the rein at the same instant.

To her, all three felt like asking for canter. To him they were three different questions, and the third one asked him to go forward and stop at once. He gets Monday right, Wednesday late and Saturday wrong, and it's Saturday he gets told off for.

A horse doesn't learn what you meant. He learns what you did. He's an extremely accurate record of your habits, including the ones that only appear when you're tired or being watched.

The other half of it is correcting today what you allowed last week. He offers something, is patted for it on Tuesday and growled at on Sunday, and quite reasonably stops offering. Consistency isn't about being strict. It's about the same question having the same answer.

This is why I'll have you ride a plain transition ten times when you were hoping for something more interesting. The transition doesn't need the practice. The asking does. It's the same argument as forward is not the same as fast: most of the work is in the quality of the question.

None of which means it's always you

A piece like this can tip over into telling riders that everything is their fault, which is untrue and unkind.

Plenty of it isn't you. He may be sore, the saddle may not fit, the ground may be wrong, he may not have been warmed up, or he may simply have a view about the wind today, which is a subject in itself and one I've written about in your horse is not a bicycle. A sudden change in a horse who was fine last month is a veterinary question before it's anything else, and I've set out how I decide that in will not, or cannot?.

The mirror is one line of enquiry, not the answer. What makes it worth checking first is that it costs nothing to check.

Why this is good news

Being told your horse reflects you can sound like an accusation, and it isn't meant as one. He has no theory about the sort of rider you are, and he isn't comparing you with last winter or with anybody else in the paddock. He responds to what's happening now, which means a change in you shows up in him almost at once.

That's the useful part. You don't have to become a calmer person. You have to notice one thing and do it differently for four strides, and he'll tell you inside those four strides whether it helped. Nothing else in riding answers that fast, and if nerves are the hardest part of this for you, that speed is what makes getting your confidence back possible at all.

It's also most of what a coach is for. Not chiefly to know more about horses than you do, but to be a pair of eyes outside the picture, saying "you stopped breathing at K" while you can still feel what he did about it.

So before you decide what's wrong with him today, take one breath and check what's different about you. Often enough it's nothing. Often enough it's the whole answer.