Anybody who has attended one of my clinics knows that I only teach individual lessons rather than work a group of people and horses simultaneously. I feel individual sessions are more helpful and have better value than groups. For their time the student gets my undivided attention and we can work on specific issues relevant to that particular rider/horse combo.

With a first-time student, I usually begin by asking them for some background information and then suggest they show me what they work on at home with their horse while I watch silently for a few minutes. Then we talk about what I saw and then I start directing the work towards what I feel would be the most helpful.

One thing that I see almost every time with new students is when they begin to show me what they do at home, there is an adherence to a routine. They tend to do the same thing in the same way because it’s what they know and is comfortable.

When I see this, I have two questions that bamboozle them nearly every time.

Q1. Why did you do that?

Q2. Why did you stop doing that?

It doesn’t matter what the exercise is. It doesn’t matter how well or poorly the exercise is being executed. It doesn’t matter how simple or complex the exercise is. Almost every student is stumped by my questions.

I am usually not so bothered by the exercises they choose for their initial workout. Most people have a bag full of exercises they pull out to check in with their horse. And most people understand that. That’s okay. But the question that really stumps them is Q2.

“Why did you stop doing that?”

Many years ago I witnessed a woman lunging her horse in a round yard before riding. I noticed that every time she asked the horse something (transition, change of direction, end the lunging) she looked at her watch. If I had asked her why did she ask her horse for something different, she would have said because her watch told her to stop doing the exercise.

“Why did you stop doing that?”

This is such an important question. The answer goes to how much of a thinking horse person the student is. It goes to how much do they understand the purpose of doing the exercise. It goes to how much do they understand between training the outside of the horse (movement/fitness) and training the inside of the horse (mind/emotions). It goes to the clarity in their own mind of what they are trying to achieve with an exercise.

The problem is not if a student stops repeating an exercise for the right or wrong reason. The problem is that most students don’t think to ask the question, why did I stop doing that?

We all understand that the purpose of any exercise is getting change. But what does that mean?

What sort of change should we be satisfied with before moving on to something else? For any specific exercise, there are dozens of changes we could be looking for. And even more subtleties within a single change. Eg, in a trot to halt transition, do we reward for a change in the horse’s feet, feel on the reins, response to the rider’s seat, smoothness, square halt, soft thoughts, a change in balance, snappiness, a change in posture, etc? In addition, within each of those changes is a huge range of options. The list of changes we could use to make the decision to stop repeating the exercise seems endless.

It’s okay if sometimes we stop repeating an exercise for the wrong reason or at the wrong time. Not a problem. We can fix that the next time. But we must never stop asking the questions, why did I ask my horse that and why did I stop asking my horse that?