Day 60 & 61: A lady with a Chilean mare, the interview and what age is best for starting riding lessons...

Sometimes I chat with a potential client who says they would really like to sign up for my training but they live too far to come regularly.
Distance is a funny excuse for something you really want to do (if you indeed really want to do it...). I used to travel from London to Gloucestershire twice a week to part-time study and train, to Wiltshire and Oxfordshire to shadow-train and for lessons, 3h a day 7 days a week to my horse at livery during my first year of University - the concept of not doing something because it's 3-4 hours away is quite an alien thing to me.

It seems to boil down to the fact that we either do something or make excuses not to do something. At times, riders say that travel is too expensive just to say in the same sentence they'd been having lessons for the last 2 years and have not improved. If improvement is the goal then maybe 2 years of lessons that offer no value is more expensive in many more ways than monetary than travelling to training that do bring improvement?

Working with people who have the no-excuse attitude is probably the best part of running my own coaching programme. I used to joke that I don't advertise too much because then the right person finds me but I am starting to think this is truly the case!

http://www.thegaitpost.com/wiola-grabowska/

I chose the Aspire blog to be my "advertising" because the seeking riders come across it and get in touch. It is definitely a much slower and a shoestring budget kind of process but oh so rewarding.
The picture at the top of this post shows my Sunday client who travelled for her training with me from Chile. She has her own Chilean horse over there but wants to progress and opportunities for that are limited where she is. We've been organising her intensive training day with me since last year as many logistical obstacles kept turning up but we managed eventually. She coordinates her UK work trips with training and I am already looking forward to seeing her again in a couple of months.


Making things happen is simply inspirational.

Talking about inspiration...I did an interview with The Gait Post where I shared some of my thoughts on training, motivation, inspirational people, international experiences and more :) If you would like to check it out, here is the link: http://www.thegaitpost.com/wiola-grabowska/

A friend of mine who runs a coaching group on Facebook started an interesting discussion today about most suitable age for starting to learn to ride and I thought the video that she posted is worth sharing...what do you think of Charles De Kunffy's opinions?



I have a base limit of 12 years old for joining the Academy but treat everyone individually upon assessment. Some children are very mature training wise and able to focus well whereas some older teenagers struggle with even more simple technical aspects of equitation.
When it comes to adults, from my experience, in most cases it is not the age but the perception of age that hinders their progress. Being "too old for this or that" becomes an excuse when in reality some exercises and movement can be difficult regardless the age.

What do you think?

Until tomorrow!
Wiola

Many ways of seeing the same

A silhouette of a drunk man shows clearly at the end of my path. It's a quiet, early morning sporadically broken by excitable voices of children on their way to school. The distance between myself and the drunk man decreases with every power step I take. I am watching him as I try to predict which way the percentages in his blood take him next so I can move onto the opposite side.

Just as we are some 20m away from one another, he looks to his left, his weight shifts slightly to that side, his right leg, as if by magic also drawn to the left, crosses over towards the aim of his gaze. To my dismay, his next step and the next one are an exact copy of that first one.

In a beat as regular as ticking of the clock and with the jointless fluidity only drunk person can master, the man half passes himself directly onto the road  (no cars approaching), moves several steps straight parallel to me and then proceeds to look right and half passes back onto the pavement to end up behind me.

Neat.

Mental note to self: read more un-horsey books and try not to see people's walking patterns as dressage movements.

Now, how adorable is this chap! I have never known a horse that loved attention and hugs as much as Teddy.

Instruction Manual of Ted: 1. Walk up to stable door 2. Hug . Yes, I am wearing an exercise sheet that normally is used on horse's back. It made for a great waterproof cape during on/off showers today ;) 

I've been thinking today how easily the same instructions mean so many different things to different riders. When I am in the arena, I can address anything unclear very quickly, encourage the rider to ask questions and find their own ways of understanding the movement or build awareness.

The reason it has been on my mind is due to the popularity of one of my recent posts on my coaching blog ( the one titled: The Forward Thinking Hand...) . The post describes an exercise-experiment which I have done with numerous riders over the last few years but I have never written it down. The reason being - it's very hard to describe sensations and riding feel. As many people have now shared the article on Facebook, I got to read some comments their friends left under the shared post.

At first I did question my judgement. You see, I do like finding parallel "feels" for riders who might not ride several horses a day, few times a week... The catch with my ideas is, they require a detective like approach. They ask for trial and error, for coming up with own solutions.

One comment especially made me think a lot. Someone said they didn't think exercise worked for them because as they tried it, they felt tension in the arms. The funny thing in this exercise is, that's exactly what it creates at first. In fact, it mimics the issue many riders have on a horse - they ride with very tense arms...Then you need to figure out another way of moving, shifting weight, directing energy via different technique in order to arrive at almost no arm tension at all.

I thought, perhaps I shouldn't have written it all down. Then again, it seems to be helping many riders and I have received very positive feedback on it also so my next thought was, perhaps I need to learn to word the explanations better in the future. Find a way to ensure a potentially good idea doesn't kill itself.

And then the third thought...perhaps like me seeing drunken men half-passing around the street, we simply process different concepts differently and that is okay :) I've concluded that as long as it helps some riders who clicked on the article, the mission of the blog is accomplished.

A little upbeat introduction to 2014 :)

Let me know if you like it :)