Category Archives: Learn

Do you ever wish you could lunge your brain to make it quieter and more cooperative? Good news: there is a way. Sport and life come with emotions and sometimes...

Sure, I had my focus on the athletes that I coached throughout the Olympic Games. But Rio was also a great case study for the habits of highly successful athletes that ever competitor...

Like most nineteen-year-olds, I am a broke college student, and when you add being an equestrian into the mix, it only makes things worse. This summer, my parents expected me...

Picture this: human and animal moving in unison, coming together for a brief connection. Those who witness are left holding their breath in complete wonderment of what the rider must...

The most important aspect of show jumping performance is the ability of the horse to keep all of the rails in the cups. Horses that have a relatively low percentage...

Course designers have a number of tools at their disposal when building a course. They play with the types of jumps and the elements they're built with. They tweak the distance...

McLain Ward jumps Grand Prix courses like he's executing the world's biggest equitation final—he's smooth, precise, and deadly accurate. But while he may make the show jumping appear effortlessly easy,...

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love numbers. They allow us to quantify performance and search for patterns within sport that may not be otherwise apparent. For this...

Michael Phelps’ victory over Chad Le Clos in the 200m butterfly at the Rio Olympics was truly something to witness. First, we got a glimpse behind the scenes in the...

Your trainer helps you with your horse in special, invaluable ways. They teach, demonstrate, encourage, cajole, enlighten, cheerlead, remind, remind again, motivate, facilitate, remind yet again, and generally provide you...

You may think confidence is something you either have or you don’t, but that’s not true. Confidence comes from taking risks, failing, learning, and trying again. It comes from practicing,...

The enduring relationship between human and horse is one of the world's most significant developments. Once domesticated, horses literally changed the course of human civilization. Even in the modern mechanized...

There is a lot of recent discussion about the hunter divisions and the many problems surrounding the sport. This is a topic that has been debated since the 1970's when...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zxbE2siHQ8 Since the publication of my book RIDING HOME ~ The Power of Horses to Heal, I have discovered many remarkable programs that utilize horses to heal a number of varied emotional...

As an equine fitness specialist my job is always to ask how we can improve the horse’s body. One of the simplest ways we can do this in daily riding...

The first time I made the team it was by default. It was 2011. Andy and Carlene Ziegler (owners of Artisan Farms) had just bought me a horse, Southwind VDL,...

There are plenty of situations you can walk into without a plan. Horse showing just isn't one of them. Whether it's a quick weekend away or a two-week-long extravaganza, "Working Equestrian's"...

Dirty boots. Ill-fitting tack. Number obscuring hair bows. Sometimes the littlest things can make a bad impression on the judge! Julie Winkel, a hunter and equitation judge with more than 30...

[show-list] About the Author April Clay is a rider and sports psychologist in Calgary, Alberta. Want to learn more about show preparation and mental toughness? Check out the Resilient Rider Online...

Live in the moment. Be here now. Look at your feet; that’s where your life is. The past has been spent; the future is an unwritten check but the present...