Learning to Ride Again…try bareback
Have you been confused over which way you want to start to ride again, Western or English? Does it seem as if riding styles have blended or grown apart? Do you feel like you've forgotten how to ride?
All of these questions pose a serious dilemma for the beginner in our sport. From dressage to western pleasure, from jumping to cow work, from endurance to polo -- there are more than enough activities to go around for the horse enthusiast.
Quite honestly it's all about horsemanship, riding, and enjoying the horses and what they bring to our lives. However, this seems to be forgotten by a number of people. In fact even the methods of teaching riders what to do varies from group to group. And I'm not talking about the specifics of a discipline within our sport. You see, the sport is riding…RIDING, and after that comes all of the variations involved within it. Just like automobile racing is racing…RACING -- then come all of the variations involved with it.
So how do you teach someone to ride so that they can be versatile in a variety of equine disciplines? Easy you teach less -- and let them explore more.
I've noticed that horseback riding is one of the few activities/sports where participants are almost immediately groomed for a specific direction within the sport instead of getting general instruction about the sport. What I mean is this….
In any other sport or activity, children are taught to have fun first and be competitive later. They're taught to kick a ball, hit a ball, catch a ball, chase a ball, throw a ball and have fun with the ball FIRST. Once they're proficient at “playing” with the ball, they're slowly groomed and directed toward the sport in which they're interested. Seriously, when was the last time you saw anyone learn to hit a baseball while someone pitched a 90mph fast ball at them? You won’t see that, and I think you'd agree that it wouldn’t make sense to do it that way.
You see the reason most children ride so well is that we don’t expect much from them, and children learn to play with their horses. They learn to have fun first. Just like learning to play ball, fun comes first, then the seriousness of being competitive, then the isolation of choosing one “ball sport” over another. The point is: first we learn about the ball, then we learn to move it with various parts of our body, then we figure out how to use tools with it, and finally we start to graduate toward a specific ball sport, and lastly if we're good enough we specialize in a certain sport. And so it is with most sports -- except riding.
It seems that too often people choose or are pushed into the style of riding that someone else wants for them. Sometimes this is determined by what style of riding their parent engaged in as a child. But with almost no forethought, new riders and returning riders are directed into a discipline right away either by friends or instructors. And almost immediately they are schooled and directed to ride the way that discipline has done it for years. Sit in a particular position, keep this aligned with that, look this direction, hold your head this way, wear this gear, and use this saddle. Why? Does it occur to you that trying to teach someone to ride a particular discipline/style is like trying to teach a kid to learn about the ball while throwing him that 90mph fast ball?
Just teach the new rider to ride -- to play ball, so to speak. Let them have fun, let them explore, let them worry less about perfect position and more about staying balanced and feeling how the horse moves underneath them. Worry less about the type of saddle and more about how the saddle fits the horse. Does it really matter to a beginning rider whether or not they are in and English vs. Western saddle? It matters mostly to the instructors. I've never seen a new rider (child or adult) say they can’t ride the horse because it's wearing the wrong type of saddle. Most new eager students just want to get on the horse and try to ride. Many returning riders are not sure where to start and are often confused when someone tries too hard to make them ride a specific way in a specific position.
What better riders we might all be if we spent the early part of our training worrying less about what we looked like or how we sat on the horse and more about staying in balance with the horse? Kids do so well because they don’t care what they look like while riding -- they only care about staying on the horse and having fun. That's where most adults should be when starting , too. Just think about staying on the horse. How many times have I heard an adult rider say, “When I was a kid I never fell off, in fact I rode bareback all the time." That's because they learned to ride without worrying about being in a fixed position, and in time, with practice and play, they were galloping across the fields bareback. Remember when you used to do it, well… you can do it again if you want.
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