How Do You Know You’re Making Progress With Your Horse?

When it’s time for a schooling session our thoughts often turn to what we need to do to get better. It’s important that you think about the exercises your horse can do and include those early in the session to build confidence before you introduce the challenging ones. Try to remember that over time your expectations increase and it’s easy to fall in to the trap of judging yourself too harshly. It’s natural to want to do everything perfectly but this can get in the way of your partnership with your horse. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes rather look at what happened and why. 
When you consider instead how far you have come and celebrate the small steps forwards, you get a much better picture of the progress you are making. 

Practice the right way.    
Warm up with a plan that is familiar and helpful to your horse. Your aim here is to check your communication with your horse and notice how they are feeling today. Your horse will be reading your energy too so this is a great time to check in with your rider headspace and to focus on you and your horse.

Begin the main part of your session with a favourite exercise and notice what’s going well. Notice your horse’s responses today. When you move on to the exercise that is new or perhaps more challenging find a way to link the pattern to the previous one so you are able to refresh your paces and your confidence. Think of it as dipping a toe into the learning zone with the comfort zone there to remind you both of your strengths. Remember to work equally on both reins and to include plenty of walk rest breaks and opportunities for stretching / relaxing.

Your cool down phase can include something you find easy allowing you both to relax and finish on a good note. 

Record what you do in the session.   
Keep a diary so that you can note your thoughts about the session. Try always to record 3 good things that happened or 3 positive thoughts or feelings about the session. Consider how your horse reacted today and how you worked together. Record what you did in the schooling session, what you noticed, what challenges you faced and how quickly you were able to regain focus and your horse’s attention on you. 
There are different ways to keep a journal and it’s quite a personal record of your relationship with your horse. You might keep a handwritten journal or perhaps take digital notes. Voice notes can be useful to capture how you felt after riding. I find there is a special element of reflection linked with handwriting. Experiment with what works for you. 

Reflect on your experiences.    

Reflection can take many forms and, again, it’s a personal choice how you work through this part of the process. Often it’s a bit like a joining-the-dots exercise. You might look at photos or videos and consider what you are seeing. Link this to what you remember feeling or to feedback you received. Sometimes there are lightbulb moments when you make a new connection and can see how and why things are happening.

You can reflect while you are riding too. During a walk break, for example, you might think about what you have just been doing, make a connection and decide to try a slightly different approach. Then there is reflection after the session, perhaps going over your diary notes and thinking about what happened. Sometimes you can make a connection months or even years after an event, at the most unexpected moment.

Review what has been happening. 

It’s a good idea to check in with yourself and look at what’s been happening lately. Look at the progress you have made and how things went when you introduced a challenge. Have you tested your training? Maybe you have competed in an online competition filmed in your arena, or perhaps you have travelled to a competition?

A helpful way to test your progress can be to travel to a new arena or venue, perhaps for a test riding clinic or clear round jumping competition. If you don’t have transport, online competitions can be a useful way to introduce some of the added pressure of riding a test in competition conditions. 

It’s handy to have video footage so you can compare what you felt with what you see and any feedback you have from a judge or coach. If you had a different feel from the test comments, you have valuable information to consider and discuss with your coach. Where you understand the comments, even if you don’t agree with the marks, you have incredibly valuable information too.

It’s important that you don’t change your training plan to try to please an individual judge. Look at what the judge was seeing at that moment in relation to the training scales, because this gives you a measure of your performance on that particular day.

For jumping rounds, record your thoughts on rideability, rhythm, responses and technique over fences as well as the outcome of the round. All of this can help you decide what to work on next.

I encourage jumping riders to include dressage tests as part of their flatwork schooling because they can offer useful insights into the way of going and make flatwork training more focussed.

What will you do next?

Now you have new information to use in your next schooling session. In real life you might complete several schooling sessions before you test your progress at an event, but keeping your training diary up to date and recording each session soon afterwards can be really helpful when you look back.

Of course, one of the most important parts of schooling is to have fun with your horse, and I find that is a great measure of progress. Having fun tells me we are communicating and achieving things together. A question to ponder is: how do I know when my horse is relaxed and having fun?

Remember to enjoy training your horse and allow time to progress at a comfortable pace. Change can happen gradually, and keeping a record gives you the opportunity to notice your progress as a partnership.