Improving as a rider and fixing bad habits takes a long time. Charmayne James explains why it’s important to stay hooked to the process and offers advice and encouragement for bettering yourself and your horse.
So many people want quick fixes to problems on the pattern that can be hard problems to fix in the end. They don’t always remember that they have to train their body to have good habits as much as they have to train horses to have good habits. Training and riding is not about just getting a horse to do it, but training correctly through repetition and habits — that goes for the rider, too.
I try to help people understand that it takes a long time to develop good habits. If you’re breaking old habits and trying to learn new, correct habits, it takes even longer. Riding is a constant journey, never a quick fix.
Start Breaking the Habit
Developing new habits and breaking old ones requires rewiring your brain and your muscles in a different way. Learn the new habit correctly, and then work on repetition every day at a walk and trot at home. Practice it going fast at a show or in an exhibition, then keep going back to slow work to further develop your muscle memory.
It’s very important to understand the process of improving yourself, why you’re changing the habit and be truly bought-in on changing. When you understand what’s happening and why it’s not working, mechanics-wise, you’ll be a lot more motivated to ride correctly.
It absolutely gets harder to maintain a new habit going fast. Your subconscious brain is taking over at speed, so it takes time to re-program yourself into the correct way of doing it. You have to train going slowly, but you also have to try and go fast.
The problem with going fast is that you can’t make a lot of fast runs on your horse. If you practice going fast at home, that will blow most horses up to where you can’t do slow work. Your fast runs need to be away from home, and that’s why this process takes such a long time — you can only go so much.
Keep doing your slow work and practicing muscle memory. Plus, visualizing how you want to do it is also another tool you can use. Imagine those factors in your run, how you want your body positioned, how you use your hands.
The other part of it is fixing the habit in your horse, so it takes a lot of discipline for you to start doing the same thing consistently for your horse to adapt to the correct way, and that’s also why it can take such a long time.
Explore Your Options
What you’re doing is two steps forward, one step back. In that process, if you do make a mistake, be sure to learn something from it. Things won’t go right every time. If you fail, adopt a mindset of learning what went wrong and finding out how to fix it.
You may learn in that process that it really wasn’t your riding or necessarily your horse’s mind, it might have been a physical restraint or pain in your horse. He may not have been fit enough to hold himself in that correct position, or something might be going on in his mouth, body, joints or feet. It could be something health-wise such as EPM or bleeding; there could be so many other things going on. If that horse is a in pain or uncomfortable going through the barrels, it’s going to tear his confidence down. You have to be confident in yourself and your horse to be successful.
It’s important to always look at the whole picture and always try to stay educated. One professional you go to may not have the answer you need, but it may be another professional who has the right answer for you.
There’s so much to learn, no matter how long you’ve been doing this. It never mattered how long I’d been competing or teaching. I’m still learning more every day. Use your resources and tap into your intuition to help lead you to the right people in the right place at the right time.
This article was originally published in the December 2023 issue of Barrel Horse News.
