The Power of Walk

31/10/2024

Spinal Rotation in Bend

I've heard a few people say that they are confused about rotation in bend. Here's a resource to demystify the simple concept. It's something every rider should be aware of: so often we see riders at every level sitting on the outside of the horse during turns and lateral movements. Maintaining correct rotation is so important. Feel free to share!

28/10/2024

Welcome to Slowvember!

Slowing down is the most simple yet profound thing that you can do for your horse, which is why we are excited to invite you to join us for this year’s Slowvember challenge. A dedicated community of horse lovers are slowing down for the whole of November, with simple but impactful exercises, tips, discussions and more. If you are up for the challenge, stay tuned to join like-minded people in this serene space where you and your horse can connect.

Consider it a retreat—a time to reflect, pause, process, and reset.
To participate in Slowvember, head on over and join my group "Slow Walk Work" or if you prefer to receive your exercises by email, you can register using the link in the comments. We can't wait to have you on board!

21/10/2024

The Dithering, Directionless Horse Lady?

I am a questioner, a critical thinker. This is what’s enabled me to step outside the norm, to reject a lot of what I was taught as fact, and to find a better way. With this, comes some challenges which I think a lot of you will relate to.

We can see that something isn’t right, but we lack clarity on how to make it better. We yearn for someone to teach us, but we’re not ready to trust anyone.. very often, our perception of what is being taught doesn’t match the perception of the person who is teaching it, and in the past we have been stung by thinking we’ve found the right teacher and then finding ourselves doing things that still don’t feel right.

With past instructors we have frozen, and obeyed, when we really wanted to question. This has led us to do something we regretted, and we are afraid it will happen again. We don’t trust ourselves to advocate for the horse if we don’t like something we are asked to do.

Some of us cope by withdrawing into a private journey, working things out between us and the horse – a journey which can be magical and profound, but also can be full of doubt. Others keep searching, searching, trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that, flitting from trainer to trainer, pulled in different directions, never quite committing, never finding what we are looking for.

With all these factors in mind, the empathetic, intutive critical thinker can end up a dithering and directionless horse lady, paralysed by perfectionism. She gets stuck in her head and disconnected from her body.

Enter: The Horse Guru. Having never himself experienced any self-doubt, the horse guru sees only the dithering directionless horse lady. He doesn’t see the empathetic, intuitive critical thinker beneath. He lacks the intuition to nurture her into connection with her body. He doesn’t notice the bond she already has with her horse: the way that the two of them communicate, and are in tune. Deep down, she knows what her horse needs more than anyone. But she can’t tap into this when she feels pressured and judged, full of self-doubt and she becomes self-depreciating and disconnected. Her horse mirrors this, and becomes anxious and unfocused. The guru tells her to stop overthinking and just get on with it. Masterfully and effortlessly, he demonstrates how amazing her horse can be when she gets out the way. He’s satisfied with the results he achieved, but he is unable to see the shrinking that takes place, the subtle undertone of “not good enough” that she experiences. When she gets home, she’s unable to replicate the results.

Realising all of this is the first step towards tapping into something amazing. Dear Dithering Directionless Horse Lady, You are amazing. I’m not going to tell you what to do next. Deep down you already know!

05/10/2024

Fascinating to see how slow walk work can help in unexpected ways. Correcting his posture in a way that allowed him time and space to process enabled Jasper to find better body awareness, proprioception and balance so that he was easily able to balance on 3 legs and hold up a hoof. Sometimes, when horses can't hold their feet up for the farrier, the issue is not in the feet themselves.

Jasper learns to balance more easily on 3 legs, through a session of slow walk-work when we work on posture, balance and proprioception. He will now find it ...

30/09/2024

Lateral walk: What causes it, what is it, why is it bad and how can we correct it?

I was taught by a number of instructors not to work in the walk, because I could ruin it and make it lateral. Now I understand that it is not working the walk that ruins it, but jamming the horse up in any way so that they start to brace muscles. This is less obvious to see in trot and canter, but becomes obvious when the purity of the gait is lost in walk. Jasper had a slightly lateral walk when I began working with him, not because he'd been jammed up, but because he is an older horse with some stiffness issues. I resolved this through gently releasing the braced muscles using slow walk work. So that debunks that myth!

30/09/2024

"Yield the hindquarters, inside rein, near fore, quarters-in, side-pass, leg yield, disengage the quarters, off hind, on the forehand, on the bit, indirect rein, Travers..." Our language has become a mish-mash of traditional English, natural horsemanship, Western, and terms newly invented. I think the birth of the internet has brought with it so many opportunities but also a lot of overwhelm. Who on here has taken an online course or attended a clinic and felt self conscious for not understanding words and phrases that are being used frequently, and everyone else seems to be nodding along? I'm thinking of putting together a glossary or cheat sheet. I have a long plane ride next week and thought that might be excellent use of my time to distract me from the numbness of my buttocks and the fact the tea tastes like gravy. So, if you relate, I'd love it if you could hit me up with phrases or words you would like to see included!

17/09/2024

French speakers - unique opportunity for you! My new course is in the late stages of editing now and I'm excited about it. It follows the progress of lovely Jasper as I take him through a series of 6 sessions incorporating in-hand and ridden walk work. I've listened to your feedback and will be including a voiceover to talk through what I am feeling, what I am asking for and why, with subtitles as well. I'm looking into creating subtitles in French as some of you have asked for that. The editing software that I am using I am very happy with so far, and it has created me a transcript in French. I'm still working out how to make this into subtitles that appear at the right time. I was wondering if there are any French speakers who would like to get involved by watching one of the videos to see if the transcript/subtitles make any sense!! Also would anybody like it translated into another language? Let me know if you'd like to be involved, or if you know somebody who would.

02/09/2024

How many of you love attending clinics as a fence sitter rather than a participant? You get to see the clinician teach lots of session, and begin to get a deeper feel and understanding of how everything fits together.

How many of you have spent a week or more observing a trainer in their daily work? After a while, you start to get a feel for how everything fits together to bring about changes. You start to see how the foundations they laid on day 1 start to show results in day 6. You learn about how the trainer responds when things don’t go as planned, and the small but important details like how long they work the horse for, how long they stick at an exercise, and how many breaks they give. After a while, you begin to be able to visualise and even feel in your body, a clear picture of how things should be.

When I spent a month with Heather Moffett, watching her teach students and train horses, as well as being taught myself on her horses, I learned more from this month than I did in my whole life. A big part of this was the watching of other peoples’ sessions.

Spending a lot of time with talented trainers.. sometimes, you can end up feeling as if you absorb their energy and can channel this to bring into your own schooling.

I’m really putting myself out there for this one, but I’m excited about doing it because I think there is great value in what I have to offer: openly, authentically and in its fullness.

I’m very excited to share with you a little more about this course I have been working on—a course where you get full, behind-the-scenes access to my training journey with one horse over six sessions.

This unique course aims to capture the true reality of schooling a horse in slow work, so you can see it for yourself in real time. Rather than watching specific skills being taught in short clips, you will see the schooling is woven into six sessions that combine in-hand and ridden work, with a voiceover explaining my observations, actions, and adjustments.

In the course, you will observe the gradual unravelling of tension, watch trust and connection grow, and see the horse's confidence blossom as he comes into good posture and alignment for the first time.

It contains full sessions, including mistakes that I make, how these affect the horse, and how I put them right.

All the video material for this course has already been filmed, but I would now like to ask for your help to ensure I put it together in the best way to suit your needs.

If you joined me on “The Power of Walk” this course is an ideal follow on because it enables you to really see how the steps you learned fit together to bring about progress. It can give you a much clearer idea of what you are aiming for.

For those who haven’t studied with me, but are curious about exactly how profound changes can be brought about using slow work, this course will reveal all, as you see the progress taking place before your eyes. And if you need a little help understanding what you are looking at, it’s explained in the voiceover.

For people who learn best by observing, this is your chance to be my student for 6 sessions. Becoming immersed in the sessions enables you to grow confidence and get more clarity on the process so that you can go away and try it with your own horse.

At this stage, it looks as if the course will be on-demand, which means that you can dip in at your own pace. It won’t have the live sessions, intensive support and step by step instruction that you get with The Power of Walk, which means that it will be priced lower.

There may be options for support and instruction to be added on, but my initial thoughts are that these may be an optional add-on to keep the basic course affordable and accessible to all. If you have any ideas or preferences, I would love to hear about them.

Click on the link below to visit my survey and tell me exactly what you would like this course to look like.

https://s.surveyplanet.com/4j8x1hex

The before and after photos are taken from the actual course.

01/09/2024

A question I am commonly asked when teaching slow work is "How do I know it’s right?"

This question came up in today's live session. Here is a summary of my response:

The goal of this type of work is to help the horse feel better than they did before. If they experience improvements in the way they feel, both physically and mentally, this work is helping them. Any type of improvement that we are looking for will be more meaningful and long lasting if it is built on making the horse feel good.

One of the hardest parts of this is letting go of conditioning. Because we are conditioned to expect and instant response, and for the horse to be moving forward energetically and in a consistent rhythm, it can cast doubts in our minds when they are moving slowly and pausing between steps to process or experiment with different balance, which causes a change in rhythm. These pauses are where the magic really happens, because the horse is revealing for us the vulnerable true nature of their crookedness. This is our chance to address the cause, and not the symptoms. That’s why it’s so important to deepen our awareness of the horse’s experience, and to hold space for processing and let go of certain expectations. Once we learn to read the horse’s responses, built on a basic awareness of whether something is making them feel better or worse, we can better use this to inform our choices moment to moment.

If you're not sure, one of the clearest and most reliable ways to know if you are on the right track is to look back over videos and note the horse’s facial expression and body language and see if they improve during the session. Use the resource to check if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. When your confidence builds, you will get more of a feel for it: In the present moment, if the horse does it willingly and it feels easy, then it is certainly doing no harm, and more than likely is doing good. Long term, you will notice the horse becomes more focused and interested in work. Their tendency to want to go towards the exit of the arena will diminish as they feel the benefit of the work, and behaviours like fidgeting, itching, head tossing, nipping etc should diminish.

If in doubt, less is always more. Less time spent in a session, less force use, less bend and angle asked for, if in doubt whether to finish the session or carry on, always choose finish, without being tempted to try for once more. For many horses, getting used to being allowed to do something which does not involve any hard work or expectations is quite a revelation and can be very powerful in itself.