Ep 242: Regaining Rider Confidence After An Injury
This episode is inspired by a question from one of our listeners:
"I would love a podcast on how a rider can regain their confidence after an injury. My gelding spooked and bucked me off while riding in an arena with friends. I broke my pelvis. Although I am back to riding, I’m still scared to canter him in an arena. Thanks in advance!
Join me as I share some advice on this topic and my phased approach to building confidence in horse and rider after an injury.
To address this question, we must first understand that there are several different phases to rebuilding confidence.
The first is safety. Horse and rider safety is number one. A lot of times we take it for granted and we don't address it. It's one of those things that is not a problem until we have a big problem, like a broken pelvis in the arena.
The first thing you have to do to ensure a safe riding environment is regain confidence in your horse. Whether that means you get someone else to do some training on that horse for a while, or you start back at the basics and work to gain confidence with that horse at slow speeds or on the ground, you have to move forward cautiously. Move forward in a way that you build confidence each day, not destroy it.
What happens is we just get lulled into thinking everything's fine, and then all of a sudden, something triggers that switch in that horse and they flip that switch to the reactive side of their brain. When they do that, they go into self-defense mode, and if they feel an animal on their back, the first thing they're going to try to do is get that animal off their back.
Don't take it personal when this happens, because when a horse flips that switch and goes to the reactive side of their brain where they go into self-defense mode, you are going to see a side of that animal that you don’t see very often. This often happens when we get distracted or let our guard down. Something triggers the flip of that switch, we get bucked off, and then the horse is just standing there like, “what the heck just happened?”
The potential for a horse to be reactive is always going to be there. It’s part of their nature. So to begin with, you have to get yourself to where you're confident in your horse and whether that be you slowly progressing along and keeping things in a very, very safe atmosphere.
Sometimes, pairing a horse with a buddy or another rider on a separate horse can be enough to help stimulate some confidence. Horses are naturally herd animals, and while this tendency can work to their disadvantage sometimes, it can be a very useful trait to leverage in situations like this. If you have somebody that can ride that horse with you and build your confidence that way, then you can re-establish that level of trust and slowly begin to wean that horse back to riding solo. As soon as you feel more comfortable and confident, you're going to feel that from your horse as well.
Confidence is everything. If we don't have confidence in ourselves and we're not doing some things to build our confidence, our horses are going to have a hard time finding it. And if we don't have the confidence, we're going to have a hard time training our horses in such a way that they end up with a tremendous amount of confidence and comfort.
I'll give you another example of restoring riders confidence and that is after time off.
There are a lot of times when we go back to riding after we've had time off that it takes a while to. We always talked about riding ourselves back into shape, but really and truly it's you're not only riding yourself back into shape, you're building your confidence back up in your riding and, and being comfortable with speed.
When you're coming back and you're getting back into competing, meaning being under the clock, it takes a while to ride yourself back into running mode and getting your mind and body comfortable with that speed. You have to make a focused effort on getting ready and get your confidence back. Building that confidence in our riding really starts with building the confidence in ourselves.
And it doesn't have to be just with our riding – just start doing something to make ourselves better today than we were yesterday. Whatever that is, whether it's walking, riding an exercise bike, doing some sit ups, doing, doing some strength exercises here… if we're going to be strong mentally, we have to be working on our physical condition, too.
Any time you are making a comeback, you have to take it one step at a time. Sometimes, stepping back and looking at the big picture and then breaking it into steps and working on specific parts and then putting those parts together is the only way to move forward. Just pick one thing and get started.
So, just like in Kate's situation with her horse coming back, the goal is to get to where you can canter or low comfortably and confidently on that horse again. So, that is the goal – but then, let’s back up and say, “ok, what is our plan?”
What do we need to do so that we end up at this point? And, that is working on your confidence, working on yourself, working on your horse, and then understanding it's not easy and it's okay that it’s not easy.
I've ridden a lot of young horses, and there have been a couple of them that I developed a tremendous respect for because they drilled me hard, and I didn't want to get bucked off that hard again. So, in those scenarios, you just have to figure out how you can progress forward in a safe manner, but keep constantly moving towards your end goal.
