These Exercises Are Too Easy - Surely They Can’t Work?
So many times my students will feel like they are stuck on the easy exercises for too long.
Or I will give them exercises to practice, with the feedback that they are too easy and so didn’t think they would work.
Why is it in our nature as humans that it must feel like its hard for us to feel like we are improving?!?
The fact that they are easy exercises is exactly the point.
Over the years I have striven to be better by riding over the bigger jumps and doing the harder movements and thinking that my horse and I were improving because we were doing the hard stuff.
After years of working with hundreds of different horses and students I’ve learnt however doing the easy stuff often and really, really well, makes the hard stuff easy and natural.
And isn’t that truly what we want?
The training scale is supposed to be a natural progression of training and movement. While learning a new skill, refining and developing your feel and quality is hard, but the actual transition should smooth.
If you feel like you’re butting your head agains the wall and getting nowhere, rather than pushing for more, you should be looking for gaps in your horses and your own understanding and communication. If you are trying to progress and the movement falls apart, you need to spend time building condition in the easier movement, so it is not such a huge leap to execute the new movement.
We can also get the feeling that because we can already do something, we are ready for the next thing.
Is Walk, Stop & Back Up too easy an exercise, when it consistently re-establishes boundaries and respect?
Rather than achieving something and then saying “What’s next?”, we should want to achieve something and say “How can I do this better?”
I can guarantee you that the person that rides a halt transition after 1 week of practice, compared to the person who has been practising and perfecting for a year, compared to the person who has been practising and perfecting for 20 years, will have comparable different experiences of how well they can execute the aid. And even the person who has been practising and perfecting for 20 years will have gaps in their understanding compared to the person who has been doing it for 40 years.
This is why at Equestrian Movement we focus on the journey with our horse more so than the destination.
It doesn’t mean you can’t fulfil your grand dreams of what you want to achieve with your horse, it just means that the time frame comes second to the quality. Patience is our first skill to learn.
Repetition is good for our horse. It is how they learn.
Some horses, the more fast thinking, intelligent ones don’t like repetition so we have to think outside the box and figure out how we can practice the same exercise in different ways to get the repetition in. But overall horses learn through consistency, follow through and repetition. Exactly the way we do.
We don’t send our kids to school and expect them to know the alphabet in the first day, week or month and then expect them to be able to spell! So why do we expect our horses to understand the language of legs, seat and hands straight away and to do it perfectly every time?
Repetition wires the brain and establishes language and understanding.
Another reason why we like to use easy exercises is because we can’t establish ourselves as good leaders when we are challenging ourselves.
Have you ever tried something new that was harder and everything fell apart and your horse took advantage of it and started being “naughty”? I bet you have!
Your horse needs a strong, capable, competent leader and when you are trying something new that you don’t know how to do, you come across to your horse as incompetent. Because, well you are! At that particular exercise.
Whenever this happens in our training we must strip back to something easy to re-establish ourselves as competent leaders that our horse can confidently take direction from, before challenging ourselves again. Whether that be that ride, next ride, a week from now or a month or a year. We have to be able to leave our ego at the hitching rail each and every ride and do what is best for our horse.
So if the exercise seems too easy and too repetitive theirs a good chance it is exactly what you need to be right now.
