03/10/2024
This is the way I think about matching horses and riding students. I have taught both types of riders pictured here and every combination in between. The top is a beginner with a green horse and a new rider. The graph indicates the low skill level of the horse (left side) and the level of the rider (right side). This combination is absolutely the worst possible that an instructor might face. The bottom is a highly trained rider with a top horse ready for high level competition. This is a challenging pair to teach, but in a very different way.
The balance of the skill and training levels between student riders and their horses should always be in the very front of a riding instructor's mind. Teachers should always be asking, is the horse helping or hurting the rider's progress, and is the rider diminishing the horse's training? Beginner riders must ride horses that are consistently above the level of the rider, but not too far above.
Yes, the necessary teaching combination of a horse better skilled than the rider will always result in some untraining of the horse. This means lesson horses must constantly be tuned up by a better rider or a horse trainer to keep them at the appropriate higher level for the student.
"For the student" is the key phrase here. I see lesson riders struggling with horses that are not helping them learn, but rather hurting their confidence and sometimes their bodies. I sometimes hear instructors say things about these situations like, "I can ride the horse, so she has to deal with the horse". That statement reveals an instructor ignoring the necessary skill balance contained in this graph method of analyzing the balance between lesson horses and students.
Teaching riding is always about the unique rider and horse in the lesson you are giving in the moment, not about some general idea of horses and student riders. Instructors must have a refined focus on each student and each horse, and how they relate in lessons. If you are an instructor struggling with this balance of skill and training levels and not a horse trainer, it's a good idea to team up with a horse trainer to accomplish the goal of maintaining consistently effective rider-horse matches in your lessons.
The bottom image is of the other extreme in teaching, a highly trained horse and a highly trained rider. To effectively teach these combinations an instructor must be very perceptive regarding both the horse's skill level and the rider skill level on a very detailed level.
When rider-horse combinations like this came to me for help, it was usually because the "meshing of the gears" between the horse and rider had begun to "grind" at certain points in competitions. Either the horse or the rider was interfering with the other. Determining which of the pair to address and change is a great and interesting challenge for an experienced teacher in these kinds of lessons.
Every horse and rider combination that an instructor encounters falls between the two pictured extremes. I hope every instructor thinks about how combinations of horses and riders relate, and how other types of horse-rider pairs might fall on the graph range. If instructors are not thinking seriously about how horse rider combinations work or don't work together, chances are they are falling into the entertainment business and not focusing on their riding instruction business.
