There are a lot of mistakes you can do while working with horses. However, there are 3 horse riding mistakes that are most common and most likely are preventing you from improving. If you fix these, you will be surprised by how much improvement you will feel.
1. You are not dedicated to make your horse listen
This is one of the most common horse riding mistakes. Horses might not be able to speak, but they can sense whether you are committed to make them listen to you. They cannot be fooled when it comes to this.
Your horse can sense your commitment to make him listen before you ask him to do anything. If you try to look committed, if you are going to swing your whip around and scream, it is not going to help. What is going to help is when you are going to KNOW that your horse will just do what you ask, even if it`s not going to be easy, or even if it is going to take long.
Some people can do this easily, they are just determined, confident and their horses can feel it. However, most of the people have to “get to it” and learn it over time.
2. Avoiding situations when your horse does something wrong
Another one of the horse riding mistakes that I see often is that people simply avoid the situations in which their horse misbehaves, or doesn’t perform as he should. They just avoid them instead of working on improving.
Let me give you an example. Some horses are distracted and they care more about their surroundings than they do about their rider. They might pay attention to other horses, a plastic bag drifting in the wind or anything else they find more interesting at the moment.
If your horse pays attention to something other than you, it makes no sense to try to teach him anything.
You can try to solve this problem by simply avoiding places in which your horse tends to get distracted. This way you might get your horse to listen to you in an environment that has no distractions at all. However you do not solve your horse problem at all, you will keep carrying it with you, preventing yourself from really improving.
It is always easier to avoid your problems rather than solving them. But taking the extra effort to solve them will always pay off long term.
3. Not paying attention to your horse getting worse
Some people do not care about their horse getting worse over time. It happens, sometimes your horse just starts doing something worse than he used to. A lot of times it is because he is testing the rider. He wants to see whether he still has to listen to him and respect him. If he sees that he performed worse, and the rider did nothing about it, he will try it again the next day.
If you know that your horse is capable of doing what you are asking, stay consistent and make sure he does it. Even if it`s going to take long to get him to do it and it`s going to be difficult.
Another reason why your horse might start performing worse is that he becomes bored with doing the same things over and over again. Maybe you are doing the same exercise too many times and too quickly one after another.
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Your horse always looks for the easiest way to get rid of your pressure.
If you make it so that just doing what you ask is the easiest way to get rid of it, your horse will continue doing what you ask. Always release the pressure after your horse does what you asked for, and give him a second to realize that this is how he gets rid of that pressure.
If you ask for the same exercise too quickly one after another, your horse might not be able to realize that he did it well, he might start thinking that even if he does it, the pressure doesn’t go away. In this case, he is going to start looking for another way to get rid of the pressure, which means instead performing an exercise that he already knows, he is just going to start misbehaving.
if your horse continues to get worse for 3 days in a row, it is time for a re-think.
