I really like this photograph. The horse is a five year old Andalusian cross Arab mare, seen working in trot on the right rein. Whilst there are some aspects of her work that one would like to improve, the overall quality is very nice.

The horse has a very attentive attitude. Notice how her ears are out sideways, implying that she is paying attention internally - to her own body and the rider - and not externally. The horse whose ears are pricked is using its focussed vision to admire the view, and the rider is periferal in its awareness. This rider too has a very focussed look, and I know from experience that people’s faces can change drammatically when they enter a state of focussed concentration. Our rider has done this, I feel. One of the primary challenges of riding (as well as any other skill) is to be able to enter that state at will.

Think of it this way. Horse and rider both enter the arena with their seperate agendas. Maybe the rider is thinking, "I need to get this done quickly if I’m going to get to Jenny’s on time.", or "I’m determined to get this horse going well today.", or "I’m really too tired for this.". The horse might be doing the equine equivalent of thinking "Oh no, not again.", "There are all my friends in the field.", or "I feel so full of beans....". Good work requires them both to forget about their agendas, and to get so engrossed in what they are doing that they become unaware of time pressures, who’s watching, the horses in the field etc.

Very rarely does the horse get into this state without the rider getting into it first. One of the hardest times to enter it , as you are probably aware, is the day after the day when you had a really good ride, and you find yourself thinking "I really want to do that again. All I have to do is....". Then, of course, you are talking to yourself about riding, and not focussing all your attention on riding, which was the strategy which generated your success on the day before! But if you can centre yourself (despite all the odds) it will only be a matter of time before the horse joins you in that absorbed, focussed state.

Some horses have such enormous agendas that getting them to join you is the hardest aspect of riding them; but given the right circumstances most will willingly enter what writer Erik Herbermann calls "the blank cheque state". It’s as if they say, "I’m all yours, do with me what you will..", and this is such an act of trust and faith that the rider must continue to respect the horse’s limits (given his age, physique, and stage of training). Otherwise the horse will, in effect, end up thinking, "I’m giving my all down here and you still want more?...". That, of course, is the beginning of the end.

This rider is looking down, and if I were teaching her, I would probably continue to allow her to do so. This is in contrast to many teachers who would insist that the rider looks up. Technically they are right, but I cut people some slack because when you are thinking things out it is natural to look down. If you and I are in conversation, and suddenly I forget what I was going to say, I will ask you to "hang on a minute." whilst I "go inside" and wrack my brains for that lost sentence.

When the rider is fathoming out how to fix the problem the horse is setting her, she is, in the language of the T.O.T.E. model (which is used in computer programming) "performing an operation". T.O.T.E. stands for Test, Operation, Test, Exit. The first test happens when the rider (in effect) asks herself, "Am I getting the feeling I really want to get?". If the answer is "Yes", she keeps doing what she was already doing. If it is "No" then she has to perform an operation which will, hopefully, get her to "Yes".

Established, skillful riders are so slick with their operations that they take only a moment – and if you ask them what they did, they will probably have no clue! They then Exit the T.O.T.E., and this leaves them free to look up, and to make a good job of riding the movements of a test. But the learning rider may have to grope her way towards a successful operation – and often she will spend far more time within the T.O.T.E. than she ever spends outside it!

I believe that this is why riding teachers are usually so unsuccessful when they repeatedly tell riders to "look up". Personally, I prefer to invest my energy helping people to make changes they can actually succeed with! But if there is a need to break someone’s dependency on looking down at the horse’s neck, I will get them (assuming that they are riding a safe, predictable horse) to ride around for several minutes bent virtually double, and looking at the pommel of the saddle. Then they have to spend the same amount of time riding around gazing at the sky. This is not fun to do, but it is a tremendously effective way to break the habit – and it saves a lot of frustration on the part of both rider and teacher.

There is a lot about this rider’s body which I like. There is a very nice line from the elbow, to the hand, and the horse’s mouth, and if we cut the reins, she would be unmoved. This shows us that there is no pulling back, and it is a pleasure to see such a correct, light contact. The hands are held wide enough apart for the reins to create a corridor on each side of the neck, and this can be particularly helpful on young horses. The rider can then steer the horse down that corridor, and also bear down through it, with the idea of pushing the horse’s neck away from her through this use of her abdominal muscles.

The horse is nicely positioned on the circle. We can see that she is bent slightly to the inside, but she has not jack-knifed and fallen out through her outside shoulder. It looks as if the rider would have a very even contact on both reins, and she is certainly not pulling on the inside rein to bring the horse around on the circle. The acid test, of course, would be to discover if she can turn to the left as well as she turns to the right, and if she can, she deserves mammoth congratulations!

It looks to me as if this photograph catches the rider at the top of her rise in rising trot. Its angle does not give us the clear viewpoint I would like, but I would lay a bet that if we took her horse out from underneath the rider by magic, she would land on the riding arena on her feet. Her lower leg is nicely back under her, without the exaggerated down-and-forward heel that one so often sees. There is also a nice line to her upper body, and she is neither round backed or hollow backed. Her chest is not exaggeratedly lifted or dropped.

The horse is probably not quite active enough, and not as round as she could be. I doubt if the left hind leg - which is advancing - will make it into the hoof print left by that foreleg. I also suspect that the horse’s nose is quite a long way in advance of vertical, so that although she is not contracting her neck and "pushing back" at the rider, she is also not reaching and arching her neck sufficiently into the rein. This implies that her back is probably making a small hollow.

I would like to ask this rider, "When you land in the saddle you do find yourself sitting on a flat surface, down in a hollow, or on top of a little mound?". This would direct her attention to the horse’s back, and this in itself might be sufficient to generate the change that we need. Unlike the vast majority of riders, I do not think that this rider’s attention is focussed primarily on the position of her horse’s head . (Time for an honest assessment. When you ride, what percentage of your attention is focussed on your hand, the rein contact, and the position of the horse’s head,? And what percentage of it is focussed on your pelvis and thigh, the shape of the horse’s back, and the contact that you make with it? These two figures must add up to 100%.)

In answer to this question, many riders are forced to admit that 80% of their attention (or even more) is focussed on the horse’s head position. I then suggest that they will need to reverse these figures and bring 80% of their attention onto the shape of the horse’s back and their pelvic positioning. For this is how good riders influence horses. Many people find that changing their focus of attention is very hard, but I believe that it is the change which allows all other changes to happen.

Unlike many riders, our rider here is not doing so many things wrong that she has become part of the problem. If we were to plot this idea on the horizontal axis of a graph, she is certainly not in the negative, and she has at least reached zero. But she is also not doing things enough right to get as far into the positive as we would ideally like to see. She is close, but it will take a little more muscle tone, and a more precise way of using her pelvis and bearing down. I hope she can work out how to do this, wish her well as she builds on the nice beginning she has made.

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