Until recently I have always been a great believer that you can’t teach ‘feel’ when it comes to riding. You can either feel what is going on underneath you or you can’t, and no matter what your coach says to try to get you to understand what it should feel like, if you can’t feel it, you can’t feel it!
But what do we mean when we talk about ‘feel’?
Feel is the capacity to feel what’s happening underneath you at any given time. It enables you to feel immediately what your horse is doing, what diagonal you are on or whether you are on the right canter lead, whether your horse is soft and in the correct outline and whether you have the right canter to jump a fence – all without help from your coach or by looking down to check!
A feeling rider knows what aids to apply, why they need to use them, when they need to use them and for how long. It becomes instinctive.
Natural Feel vs Learnt Feel
Some lucky riders are born with natural feel and will often do things so instinctively they can’t even tell you what or how they have done something. For those riders who aren’t born so lucky the good news is that whilst it is still very difficult for coaches to teach someone how to feel, we can with hard work and dedication still learn to feel.
I have recently been working through some contact issues with Splash and found myself getting more and more fixated on what his neck was doing, how much flexion and bend we had and what was going on with the contact. I had stopped trusting my instincts and I was over thinking everything.
With over-thinking sometimes comes a certain amount of rigidity in your riding. When you’re thinking and trying so hard, that the natural feel of the body doesn’t get communicated to our brain. The brain is trying to control the body to manufacture something, and therefore prevents any input from what you are feeling.
And then last weekend during a dressage lesson, our trainer Ian Woodhead got me to do a really simple exercise to help me find my feel again… he told me to shut my eyes for four-five strides and trot around the arena! It did however come with a warning not to crash into his fence otherwise he might just wet himself laughing!
So off I went and as if by magic I could suddenly feel what I needed to feel. I found my instinct kicking back in and intuitively started riding and reacting to what I was feeling, rather than being fixated on what I could see in front of me or in the school mirror. Every time I felt myself freeze and stop responding, I would shut my eyes for a few strides, feel it again and off we would go.
Now I probably need to put in a disclaimer and say that I’m not advising everyone goes around with their eyes shut all of the time! You need to know your horse, trust them implicitly, do it in a safe and confined arena and have someone on hand just in case. But if you want an exercise to help you develop your feel, then this is a great way to start.
Trust your instincts
Once you start developing your feel, make sure you trust your instincts. No-one else is riding your horse and what you are feeling may be very different to what someone might see from the ground.
Talk to your coach and tell them what you are feeling, it will make their job much easier, your time spent riding will more enjoyable and ultimately your horse much happier.
Liz x
Top Tip from EquiTeam’s Coach:
There are lots of additional exercises that you can do to help develop and enhance feel, but if you struggle with feel, remember that simply breathing and allowing your body to move with the horse is the best thing you can do.
In addition utilise any opportunities to rider other horses in a constructive way thinking about what you can feel, what you like, what you think the horse needs work on.
