subject: Relaxing In The Saddle Will Help With Your Schooling [print this page] Being tense in the saddle will always pass on to your horse and hinder any training you want to do. By identifying clear goals that you want to achieve with your horse it will help to reduce nervousness and anxiety and provide you with a clearer picture of how your training can progress. It is important to identify your horses strengths and weaknesses, determine what you feel he would be good at and areas that you need to work on to improve your riding.
Each schooling session should be started with a warm up for yourself and the horse. The warm-up should not be anything specifically demanding and should be performed together with impulsion, forward thinking and purpose. Keep it relaxed, calm and not rushed. However long you decide that you want your schooling session to last there should be one clear and achievable goal that you know together you can get right. Whether this is something more straightforward like the perfect 20 meter circle or something more complicated like shoulder-in or other lateral movements. The main purpose is to finish with a sense of achievement and forward thinking towards your next schooling session.
Breathing correctly when riding, as simple as it may sound, often gets overlooked. Sometimes the concentration involved can distract you from breathing deeply, inevitably leading to you being short of breath, less calm, more tense and less able to perform over prolonged periods of time. Simple exercises such as shoulder shrugs / circles, walking steadily with your feet out of the stirrups whilst dropping your legs and circling your ankles are just some small activities that can be done to relax you before and after a schooling session.
