Maintain punctuality on lessons

Never forget that for your instructor, it is a job from which he or she makes a living. Time is money for him or her. If your lesson is scheduled for 10:00 am, be there by 9:30 or 9:45 at the very latest, so that you can prepare your horse for riding. There is not much work involved if you are simply being handed over the horse by a student who immediately preceded you; if this is not the case, you may need to fetch the horse, groom him and tack him up.

You should not expect your instructor to adjust his or her schedule if you happen to be late.

If you have prior knowledge you are going to be late or altogether miss a riding class, be courteous and call your instructor to let him or her know. Instructors most generally have a 24 hour notice period for cancellation. If you cancel 24 hours or more prior to the scheduled appointment, you will not be charged for the cancelled lesson. If not, you will find yourself paying for a lesson you never had.

You may consider this to be a bit harsh but it is meant to prevent people from improper behaviour like failing to turn up for a coaching appointment without prior notice.

Maintain punctuality on payment of fees

The general practice is for stables to ask for payment in advance. They are protecting themselves from students who take their lessons and then fail to pay. Even when your stable has no advance payment requirement, you should go ahead and pay them in advance anyway. This way, you are demonstrating your seriousness to your instructors.

Be an avid student

You can do yourself and the money you have paid justice only if you are a willing and wanting student. It is all a question of listening to instructions with close attention and following them with diligence. Remember that it is not what instructions you receive that count, but what you walk away with in your head. As a learner, you can’t try for perfection (which you cannot achieve) or competence and expertise (which you can achieve) by failing to follow instructions and by making excuses.

Clean up once you are done

Never stop being courteous. Try and leave things in better shape than when you found them. When you use the cross ties, sweep up any mess you create. If your horse poops scoop the poop up and properly dispose of it. I never stop at just taking away the manure and dumping it in a wheel barrow. I go a step further and dump the barrow at the appropriate place. While this may take a bit more time, it does help greatly with keeping things clean and with relations with the stable personnel.

When you are done with the riding lesson, wipe all tack and equipment used by you till they are spotlessly clean. This way, you are extending a courtesy to the next rider and you are also helping keep the tack in fine condition. You could check out the condition of the tack while you are cleaning it for damage that needs to be repaired.

When you show the kind of courtesy mentioned you will notice that your instructors will reciprocate: they will go out of their way to make your learning experience a resounding success.

Almost all horses will have a weaker rear leg on their soft sides. This is not to be interpreted to mean that there is some sort of problem; weaker legs arise because horses are not ambidextrous and tend to favour one side over the other, like human beings. Again like human beings, this makes one side – the normally used side – stronger and the other side weaker. Your horse’s weaker leg will be on his hollow or “soft” side. His stronger leg will be on his stiffer side.

Usually, weaker rear leg doesn’t step directly beneath the horse’s body. It displaces just a bit off so as it carries less weight. To compensate, the rear leg on the stiffer side carries a bigger share of the weight.

It all falls back, of course, on the logic that continued use makes for better muscles. Unless you work on rectifying your horse’s tendency to favor one side, one of his hind legs will continue to get weaker, and the other will continue to get stronger.

Obviously, adverse effects are compounded as time goes by, like uneven bit contact, inconsistent lengthening and inability to attend satisfactorily to lateral work on either side.

Your horse may use very unconsciously subtle ways to avoid placing weight on his weaker hind leg. He may be putting down this leg just an inch or so off. Any person on the ground with reasonable observation powers can tell you which leg the horse is “unloading”. Walk, trot or canter straight in one direction, then in another. No matter which way you go, your horse will favor one leg: if his left rear leg is weaker, he will be off to the left slightly.

Your benign antagonism tactic needs to be just as subtle as this evasion may be. You need to solve this issue by loading a little weight onto your horse’s weak hind leg. Assuming his left leg is weak, you should move his hindquarters a fraction to the right so that the left leg is forced to step beneath the body. Keep bringing this position up on all curves and lines, in both directions. This enables the weaker hind leg to develop some strength. I do have a cautionary word here. Make sure you allow the horse plenty of walking breaks so that his muscles get an opportunity to relax. You don’t want to cross the line between strengthening them and over straining them.

If you have a more educated horse, you can work similar exercises on him by constantly getting him into in a shoulder-fore position when tracking left. When tracking right, get him into a gentle haunches-in position. All the positions you get him into should end up getting his rear left leg just a bit to the inner side of his front left leg. The displacement need not be more than an inch or so.

Quite often, dressage is called horse ballet. Dressage has been designed to showcase natural abilities in a horse as well as its responsiveness to its rider’s cues. Originally, the intention was to train horse to ride easy under all circumstances and enhance their inherent gymnastic abilities. The roots of today’s dressage can be traced back to some well defined, sequential teaching techniques developed by European riding masters. Classic techniques of dressage are even now considered to be a critical component of this event.

Probably the most universally recognized equestrian sport is show jumping. Surely you too have had occasion to try to will a horse over a high barrier as you watched it on TV? Competitions may vary in details, but the concept is the same everywhere: The horse-rider team must follow a given route around the arena, jumping obstacles one by one. The Puissance events are the most exciting, with the fences gaining in height with each jump and the crazy dash through the truncated course when a winner has to be determined from among two or more horses that have cleared their earlier rounds.

Cross Country rallies are both tests of endurance and horse-rider coordination. The course takes the teams over a long, varied course loaded with some punishing obstacles. Event horses and riders cannot afford to be at anything but the very peak of physical condition. This event is the equine equivalent of the decathlon. At these events, horses are painstakingly monitored to keep them from suffering avoidable harm.

Olympian equestrian events are unusual in that they are among those very limited events where both sexes compete on the same terms. Probably because of this, there has been a steady increase in the presence of women competitors, to the extent where 80 percent of all competitors are now feminine. Their presence has accelerated changes in the sport. The emphasis is on peak fitness, proper diet and regular exercises for both horses and riders. Pure physical strength is no longer a vital part of the equation.

Equestrianism is a sport ultimate. It necessitates that horse and rider slog it out for years together and hone their skills, mixing up elegance with endurance and topping it all off with strength and endurance in a manner no other sport can match. It is the only Olympic sport that brings man and animal together as a team of equals.

I was not alone in that passion, and in school I had a close clique of friends whose common interest was horses. Sometimes people seem to leave their passion for horses behind as they grow, but I am never sure if they have actually gotten rid of their passion, or if they have just subdued that passion. The true horse nuts know nothing else. Their world consists of horses and more horses. They dream of horses at night and day dream of them by day. These people gravitate to the world of horses when seeking careers: they become veterinarians, farriers, jockeys, show riders… anything to do with horses. It is not necessary that every horse nut becomes a competition rider. The world of horses is big, and there are all sorts of career opportunities in this world.

Hundreds of thousands of horses and riders are involved with equestrian sports around the world. Hundreds of thousands of professionals like veterinarians and people with horse-related skills serve these horses and their riders. Every horse-related career type has its irreplaceable place: vets, trainers, farriers, stable hands, race jockeys and show professionals. The world of horses would be incomplete without any of these people. They can be found in other direct and indirect horse-related fields of enterprise, too: manufacturers and sellers of feed, riding gear, riding attire, trailers, medicine and vaccinations… you name it.

If you are determined on a career in the world of horses, you obviously have to identify where your particular talents and interests lie. You need to research those avenues of employment or business that suit you best. You need to make very sure of the correctness of your choice, because you work best when you are doing what you love to do. If you are an enthusiastic stable hand/ groomer, your enthusiasm will rub itself off on the horses in your care. They will find your spirits infectious, and will reflect the same spirit themselves.

Some obvious questions you need to ask yourself before you settle on the right career include:

• Do I want to work in physical proximity to horses?

• Do I want to work in the physical care taking aspect or the medical care taking aspect?

• Do I want to be in the thick of action: races, events?

• Do I want to be a trainer?

• Do I want to go into breeding?

These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself. Your final choice will depend not just on your own interests, but also on the academic and practical opportunities that present themselves to you, and your fiscal capacity to take advantage of these opportunities, A stable hand does not need the level of education a vet does, but a vet will have spent a lot more on his education. Both jobs, however, can be very rewarding jobs. Obviously, both jobs demand different skill sets.

Here is another factor for you to consider: to do true justice to yourself, you have to listen to your own inner voice only. You cannot allow your parents or siblings or teachers or any others to dictate to you as to the choice of your career. When you follow your heart’s dictates, you will find your ideal career.

I have a system, “Benign Antagonism” that I use with my trainee horses. It helps each horse to perform to its full potential. My system operates on this premise: if your horse acts in a way you don’t care for, simply do the opposite with great calmness. My system is benign because adjustments are quiet and need no physical force. It is antagonistic because in adverse circumstances you do just the opposite of what your horse is doing. My method works with every horse, no matter what its breed, conformation, temperament, age or sex. My system allows for custom design for each horse.

To illustrate: I see lots of horses that are unfortunately behind the leg. If a horse is not very receptive to driving aids, he ends up getting ridden from front to back.

I believe horses should respond immediately to aids. A very light, almost non-existent use of your leg should elicit a crisp response from your horse. There are few equine sights uglier than riders squeezing and grinding away with their legs. It can be pretty exhausting for both rider and horse, too.

You should teach your horse to respond almost simultaneously to feather touch aids.

When not giving aids, your legs should rest on the horse’s sides. When giving an aid, the pressure should be very slight and instantaneous. It is counter-productive to adjust leg aids by making them stronger or repeating them. The better method is to make your horse more responsive by getting him to be in front of the leg.

Here’s how to put your horse in front of the leg or any other driving aid you use:

• Use a feather tough and expect him to storm ahead;

• If he fails to, tap him with the whip and/ or bump him with your legs to get him moving;

• Try out your light touch again. You must persist at it to make sure he doesn’t get lazy;

• If there is some improvement that is not good enough, chase him ahead again;

• Try the light aid again;

• When he finally starts responding as required to the light touch, praise him profusely.

My experiences with Toro made me an avowed believer in benign antagonism. He was an adorable but terribly lazy Holsteiner of 17.3 hands and1,800 pounds. During my initial days with him, I would try closing my legs and get no response at all. That made me use a bit more leg, and he’d barely react. I was labouring under the delusion that all I needed was stronger legs. I learned the hard way. After a few days Toro completely stopped paying any attention to my legs. I got the distinct impression he was laughing at me, and waiting to see when I would finally give up.

I then decided to switch over to benign antagonism. Toro was egging me into using more leg, so I decided to go the other way. I taught him to be instantly reactive to a very light leg, and thereby saved my legs a whole lot of misery. The approach worked like a charm, even with a 12-year old horse who was pretty on things his way.

There was a contrary experience, too. I began dressage on a pretty hot Thoroughbred who seemed to deliberately use threatening body language with me. I got the impression he was warning me against using my legs too much, that he would almost bolt if I tried it.

The approach I took with him differed slightly from the one I took with Toro. I wrapped both legs tight around the barrel, hip to ankle. I was trying to convey a message to him: “Here my legs are. Get used to them; they are going to be around. You have no need to fear them, so get comfortable with them. I will be using them a lot”. This particular approach was a breeze. It brought my sensitive Thoroughbred into line.

You can use benign antagonism to solve almost any training problem.