 When we enter into our horse's lives, feeling rushed or tense, maybe fearful or having our mind on a hundred things, yet nothing at all, our horse doesn't understand how to react to it. Horses don't wear wristwatches, they're not rushed, and therefore it's really important that we learn to let go of all of those things so that we can truly connect with our horse and with where they are at in this very moment. I was always passionate about helping horses in a meaningful way, and early on I realized that in order to help my horses, I first had to help my people. I had to help the rider be present and aware and connected. I had to help them slow down, and I had to help them learn how to make observations and through questioning find the answers that worked well for themselves and their horses. There's nothing more beautiful to me than a horse and rider going along together and harming. But the big question is, how do I get my horses and riders, my students, to be able to experience that? Well, I find that a lot of times for students it ends up being a hard long road when it really doesn't have to be. The important pieces of learning to ride and learning how to connect with their horses really come down to a few key things. Through written stretching exercises, I have found that it allows my students to connect with their horses to find harmony and to achieve their goals in a much easier, more straightforward way than other avenues that they've tried. So a little story about how I discovered this. I grew up with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and because of that, I visited children's hospital quite regularly and had excellent physical therapists that worked with me. My parents had a horse farm, and I was teaching my students quite regularly how to ride and do written stretching exercises as a teenager. Now, as a teenager, I was teaching younger kids, but as I got older, in my late teens, early 20s, I started having a lot of adult women riders. And I found with them, they came to the rides totally different than the kids that I had been teaching. There were some fear issues, there was stress, their minds were on all sorts of things, but not on the horse. And I noticed drastic differences both in their horses for those that had their own horse, as well as in my lesson horses, depending on the rider and where their mental state was any given day. Our mental state affects our horses. And because of that, it's important for us to have an awareness and to figure out how we can change our mental state so that we can help our horses, we can connect with them, and then we can have the ride that we desire. What I discovered with the students that I've worked with, starting with the children, I learned that they could explore patterns of movement that were not normal on the horse. I was having them not ride in a rigid fixed position. So therefore, because they were doing written stretching exercises, they had a lot of options. And when we have options, we can make corrections and we can make them more effectively. We can do it in a way that is easier for our bodies to find new patterns of movement. And therefore, we can improve our riding position in a ride by doing it. The other piece that I found with the kids, and sometimes kids, they want to steer and tell the horse where to go and they're not maybe so organized. So what I found with them, when they were doing the written stretching exercises, I found that they were actually able to harmonize with the horse and to go with the horse. Once we start being able to go with the horse, we can start feeling their movement. We get better at timing our aids because we can feel where their feet are at. We find harmony, unity and flow and we understand what that feels like. A lot of times when we're just trying to control the movement and control our horse, we're not actually finding that harmony and unity. And then when it does show up for those brief, magical moments, we don't know to release for it. And unfortunately, it leads us down a path of being a rigid, tight rider. It leads us down a path where we think we have to micromanage and control rather than just set our horse up and then allow whatever it is to happen. Now, with my adult riders coming in, being stressed out, their mind on a hundred different things, that's another place where it really does not help our horses out because our horses are very much in the moment. They don't understand having a clock and having a time frame to get something done. And what I needed for those riders was some of them were fearful, stressed out, that sort of thing. What I needed for them to do was to relax, to slow down, to connect, to find being present in the moment and to increase their observational skills and their awareness so that they were able to then go into a successful ride. When we stretch in the warmup of our ride, what we do is we relax, we increase our power of observation, we become more aware of our horses, we become more aware of ourselves, and because of that, it sets the tone for a successful ride. And that's what we want to do, right? Set ourselves up for a successful ride, set our horses up for a successful ride so that we can move forward in our training in a way that feels good to both a horse and to us. So what we're going to do right now is we're going to just go over a few stretching exercises, some simple, easy exercises you can take away from today's video, go play around with on your own, on your horse. If you don't ride, no big deal. You can do these next to your horse. What you're going to find through stretching is it's going to regulate your breathing, it's going to cause you to relax, it's going to cause you to become more aware, more centered, more grounded, all of the things that are required for us to be good horsemen and good horsewomen. So anyway, let's get started. When I get on my horse, or when I'm with my horse, if you work with your horse on the ground, the first thing I kind of like to do is a little bit of a body scan. So I might start at my toes, and I might just feel how do my feet feel in the stirrups. I'm going to use riding as an example because obviously I'm riding right now. And then I'm going to go up the leg and I'm going to feel how does my calf feel? What parts of my calf are touching the horse? Then I'm going to come up even further to my thigh. And I'm going to take note what parts of my thigh are touching my horse. As I do this, I continue to move up my body. I feel my seat, my seat bones. Does one seat bone feel heavier than the other? I feel my rib cage, I feel my back, I feel my shoulders, and then all the way on up to the head and neck. And I'm checking in just to see if there's any tension. I'm checking in to be aware of what parts are making contact because this is going to be useful information for me at the end of my stretching session to see what changes occurred. Through observation and through awareness, we can actually make real change. If we're just going along, meddling along doing stuff, but we're not aware of what's actually happening, we're never going to know how things are working. Another thing I'm always doing in my warm-up initially, just on a long rain, is I'm tuning in to see where my horse is at. I'm watching their ears, watching their eyes. Their head and neck tell me a lot. Is their head and neck low? Are they feeling relaxed? Or do they have a high head? Are they looking around? Are they nervous? Are they distracted? If they're nervous and distracted, I might not be able to do stretching right then and there because I might have to help them relax a little and I might do that through just taking up on the reins, holding their hand a little bit, guiding them softly so that they're able to come around and pay attention and get with me, become present and aware of me and attentive to me so that then we can go on with the stretching. Now, the thing I like to start with in stretching is actually the pelvis. And the reason for that is the pelvis is our connection to the ground, even though we're in the saddle, we're sitting here connected through the legs and feet to the ground from the saddle. It's not our feet. So I like to just play around with my pelvis position and I like to think about the bottom of my pelvis and see it being like a rocker and I can tip forward. You can see that hollows my back, pinches my knee and it causes my leg to swing back or I can sit in the middle of my rocker. This is more of a neutral position or I can go to the back of my rockers and I'm going to notice that. Now, when I'm on the back of my rockers my legs come forward, my toes point out and my thighs come away from the saddle. These are all things I need to be aware of so that as I'm working through my stretches I can see if things are making a difference, making a change, and then I can replicate that over and over. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to play around and I'm going to look for neutral. Really when I'm riding I'm always thinking about how can I keep my joints, whatever joints I'm talking about in the middle of its range of motion because then it can both open and close and I can follow my horse's movement much more easily and readily. So I'm going to go to the back of my rocker and so I'm sitting kind of if I have pants on I'd be sitting on my seat pockets then I come to the middle of my rocker then I go to the front of my rocker. So here hollow back, neutral back, back pushed out, thigh away from the saddle, neutral back, thigh in contact of the saddle in my middle neutral position and then front of the rocker, hollow back, pinching thigh, leg swinging back. So just think about these things, right? And I'm aware of them. What I want to do when I'm riding and doing my stretching exercises is I want to be in the middle of my range of motion in my pelvis. So I'm going to sit here in the middle of my range of motion and now I'm going to give you an exercise that you can do for your shoulders. I find that a lot of people have some tension, tightness in their shoulders and therefore you can be helpful to let go of this. It also can cause you to start to lift your energy and feel like you're looking up and you're able to focus on where you're going and therefore because you do that you're going to find your horse is going to start to perk up and tune into what you're doing. So what I'll do here is I sit up I'm going to go palm up and I'm just going to bring my hand back over their spine looking back behind me if I'm comfortable enough to do this and then I'm going to take the rain switch hands and then I'm going to do it on the side and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to feel for any restrictions in movement and I'm trying to feel for where those show up. When I have restrictions in my movement they are going to cause me to use my aids to use my seat my legs my reins in ways that are going to be different on that side because there's a restriction so I can feel that I've got a little tightness on this side so what I might do is I might just sit there a little longer and work through it and I also think about my breathing so I'm going to breathe in and out nice and regularly as I'm doing this I also want to think about my hands remaining fairly parallel to the ground so I don't want to drop my hand on that left side I can feel like my hand drops quite a bit more than on this right side here so now I'll play around with these things at the canter I think about my breathing I think about my horses breathing how do they feel at the canter our horse breathes pretty regularly because of the biomechanics of it and I hear she's getting ready to blow out so that feels good to her I'm aware of my seat feeling this I'm thinking about using my eyes