Enjoyment, relaxation, and exercise are major perks of spending time with horses at the barn. However, horseback riding is a serious commitment because your equine partner deserves your best. So, what does it take to become a competent rider? The obvious first requirement is a secure seat. How does one develop a functional “seat” on the horse and how long should it take? In this post, you’ll find a sample road map to riding competency. This map should help students’ awareness of their progress and develop realistic expectations for the amount of time and effort required to reach their riding goals.
Balanced Seat
Riding well requires you to learn to balance yourself over your seat bones instead of your feet. This is not an easy task because the body’s automatic reaction to feeling insecure or losing balance is to bring the weight forward over the ball of the foot, so you do not fall back. It takes much conscious effort on the rider’s part to learn balance on their seat bones on the moving horse. The rider must consciously align their body in a way that is often counterintuitive and continue to do so until it becomes second nature.
Fitness
Riders’ fitness is very important. If you are huffing and puffing after 3 mins at a rising trot, it will be impossible for your brain to feel or interpret any sort of feedback and respond accordingly with necessary changes. It is through repetition the rider achieves a beginning level of competency that allows the presence of mind to feel something as it’s happening. For example, when the knee begins to slip forward, or the seat bones slip back. It’s not just the repetition that makes a good rider. Familiarity allows the rider to develop a degree of awareness of what is happening that in turn allows the rider to make conscious changes at the moment they are needed.
Strong Core
Riding well requires tremendous postural strength, the ability to hold oneself erect and resist becoming “disorganized” as a result of the horse’s movement. Also, a rider needs great core strength. This means the ability to maintain a slight posterior pelvic tilt, the ability to keep your pockets down no matter what the horse does. Instead, many riders spend years riding with a hollow back while leaning their shoulders back and gripping with the thigh. They have not taken the time to learn to isolate and move their pelvis alone. Almost anyone can do it by “sitting on a straight wall” that prevents them from leaning. However, the mental part must be practiced until you “own the movement” away from the wall.
Time Commitment
It takes a great deal of time and effort to learn to ride well. If you expect to see measurable progress, you will need to commit to riding a minimum of three times per week. It takes the average adult beginner 250 hours in the saddle to achieve “advanced beginner” status. Simply said, a rider who is fairly competent at a trot on a reliable horse and is beginning to work at canter but has not attained mastery of it. If those 250 hours are meted out to once a week, that is about 5 years. This could also be accomplished by an ambitious person who rides 5 times each week in about a year. When a student goes a week between lessons, they have a whole week for their body to forget the things on which they’ve been working. Riding often breeds familiarity and eventually competence.
This is not an exhaustive list, nor does it cover all the aspects of what each rider needs to learn to feel competent on a horse. Moreover, I think it should give you a good idea of where you are and what skills you need to improve upon to move forward. From there, it is a never-ending process of refining these skills to an ever-increasing effectiveness. We never leave the basics behind in the endeavor to ride well. We simply continue refining them.
