Episode 12: Is Horseback Riding Dangerous?

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Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horse. Welcome to Season 2 and Season 1. I introduced everyone to the idea of the four-square model. This is a model that I came up with and if you want to draw in your mind, just draw a plus sign. And it has these four different sections. The riders mind, the riders body, the horses mind and the horses body. And I use this to help people understand the issues that they're having with their horse and to break them down into smaller, more actionable pieces. I'll go ahead and put an illustration of the four-square model in the show. Notes for the podcast over a Stacy Westfall BCom. In this season of the podcast, I'm focusing on the writer's body. In today's episode, I am specifically discussing danger in episode one, I discussed fear versus danger and I focused on fear. This is the other side of that where I'm going to focus on danger and I'm going to answer or discuss four different subjects inside of this. No one is horseback riding dangerous. Number two, if it is, how can we manage the risk? Number three, what is the main mistake? I see riders make and number four, let's discuss some exercises for improvement. Well, if the only question I was asking in this episode was. Is horseback riding dangerous? This would be a very short episode because I could simply say yes. All of us, if we've been around horses very long or if you do a quick Google search heavy, they're known or read about or seen a movie where somebody was hurt with a horse. So it's pretty easy to say that you can be hurt and people have even been killed on or around horses. So we have to put horseback riding in the dangerous category. Riding in cars, driving cars is also dangerous. Riding in cars and driving cars is something people do every day.

Knowing the risk and even after having been in accidents or even after having known someone who got hurt. So why is that happening and it's happening? I would propose because we realize that there is risk and because we realize there's risk, we also realize we can do some things to reduce the risk. But we also realize that a lot of areas in life involve risk. So horseback riding falls into an area of life where there can be risk. So to me, the question is how do we reduce the risk? Every once in a while when I'm out in public. Somebody will say, I'm really scared to ride my horse here, will you ride my horse and. I think it's always surprising then when I say no, because if the horse isn't safe, then the horse isn't safe for some reason that we need to figure out.

And one of those reasons can actually be a very physical, very similar to a car without brakes, a horse without training can be like a car with a failing brake system. It doesn't take a better driver if the car's brakes are failing than the car's brakes are failing despite the training level of the driver. So this takes me into my next point, which is what creates danger. And my answer is twofold. A rider that lacks training or a horse that lacks training are the two things that we can control the risk level of when we're talking about what creates danger and how we can control it. When there's a risk, we have to learn how we're going to respond to that threat. Let's turn this into a different analogy for a minute. In our houses, we typically have a plan for if there's a fire and when we plan for a fire.

A lot of times we're planning an escape route. Many times when planning an escape route, it might be from your bedroom at night when you're asleep. And for a lot of people, that might be out through the window. When we plan for the fire, we're basically accepting the fact that there's a risk that the House could somehow catch on fire and we're making a plan for how to go out through that bedroom window so that we can get escaped out of there safely. When we are riding the horse, what we have is we have a rider who needs some kind of emergency type training for how to escape out through here. But we also have a horse who is not an inanimate object in this. This horse also can handle and needs a level of training to handle pressure or these emergency situations. And the way that we're gonna manage that risk is by physically hard wiring, a response into our body. And likewise, physically hard wiring a response into our horses body. Well, one of the limitations that can happen when we are talking about this is something I'll go ahead and address right now. And that's the fact that our physical ability often changes as we age. For example, in the fire escape. Example, if we are trying to get out through the bedroom window, down to the ground from a second story, it might be out through the bedroom window onto a roof and then jump down to the ground. And a 15 year old basketball player is probably going to have a different response to that than a 65 year old woman. So knowing that doesn't change that we still need to use that as the fire escape. But what it does change is how we have to think about it and plan about it. The 65 year old woman might be more comfortable if she puts a drop-down ladder that would work there.

Also, there's things that we can talk about a little bit later where we can just also reduce the risk inside the house of the fire starting. But let's pull back to this idea of physically hardwiring the response. Two ways that I have done this with people at clinics is I've taught people how to do emergency dismounts and how to do an emergency stop and dismount. They're suddenly different at some of my clinics.

I used to have a little halfling or pony and I would take a session and lead this small, sturdy pony around and have people from a walk, swing, often dismount. And what's really interesting about doing this, if you've got somebody leading the horse, it's a quiet horse and you're doing this exercise. It's very interesting to study what happens in your body when you think about choosing to come off the horse while in motion, even at a simple walk. And I found it to be revealing as a teacher, but many, many students who were there found it very revealing to figure out what happened in their body, where they got tense, where they doubted themselves. And this was at a walk with kids or athletic riders. It's super easy. All of my kids learned to dismount at the walk and trot doing this. And from the saddle and from bareback. Interesting side note, bareback. Everybody pretty much overwhelmingly responded that emergency dismounts bareback were easier than with the saddle because there is less to get hung up on.

The main point here being you don't have to wait until you're in the middle of an emergency to practice some of this stuff. If you slow it down and break it down and hardwire into your body. Now let's pull off to the second example, which is an emergency stop and dismount. We have a lot of people that talk about emergency stops. One rain stops. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute. I think the other key to this, again, is the dismount. Personally, I learned this because I do call starting, so I stay refreshed with it. Every year that I'm starting Colt because I do a lot of getting on and getting off. And when I'm starting Colts, I am more likely to be bringing their head around towards that toe when I'm mounted so that they're bent past 45 degrees. And that's part of my teaching them to stop. And then I'm swinging off and dismounting because of the way that I start. Colt, I then we'll walk around the other side, mount from the opposite side, do stuff and then swing back off from that opposite side. So I'm basically constantly keeping myself trained to mount and dismount on both sides of the horse. I think this is something that people could pretty easily challenge themselves to do for mental and physical reasons. But it's also good for your horse to learn how to be mounted and dismounted from both sides. So it's an interesting thing that you could just stretch yourself a little bit with in general. Now, when we get our bodies and our minds hardwired into how to do this emergency, dismount safely and how to do this emergency stop and dismount safely. It gives you a level of confidence if something bad were to happen. That does not mean that we don't want to plan for how not to have problems happen. We we do want to be proactive in preventing problems.

The main mistake that I see people make. Is that. And it's kind of a double edged sword. So this is two ways. The main thing I see people make for a mistake is they either don't practice the emergency brake and the emergency stop the emergency dismount, or they practice that all the time and they don't practice advancing. So, again, they either don't practice the emergency stop and dismount or they always use the emergency brake. When I was in high school, I was driving an old Ford pickup truck that my grandfather had had and I was pulling into my grandmother's one day and the brake pedal went straight down to the floor. And I had been taught that if the brakes start to act funny, you could pump them. No, this dropped straight to the floor. My heart dropped somewhere lower than that. But thankfully my dad had taught me to go to the emergency brake in that situation. Also, thankfully, I wasn't driving very fast, so when I hit the emergency brake in the truck, it did bring me to a stop and I got out shaking. The emergency brake in your car? I'm not sure. I can't vouch for all models, but the emergency system is different than your general braking system in a lot of vehicles. I know it was back then. And because of that, even though I lost my brakes in the traditional braking sentence, I still had the emergency brake.

Now, what I see happening in horsemanship as a bit of a trend is that people have learned to rely on the one rein stop a lot. And in doing so, some people are basically living using the emergency brake very frequently as their main braking system or on the other side. We've got people who aren't practicing for the emergency at all, and I find this to be of equal problem. If you were in the camp where you were always practicing the emergency breaking. The danger you run there is very much like using your emergency brake in your car instead of your regular braking system or taking it back to the fire escape. If you just started going out through your bedroom window multiple times a day, it's not meant for that. The main door was the main doorway and the exit out the window was therefore emergency. And the problem with this we'll get more in detail when we get to the horse's body is is basically just not a very balanced way of doing anything. It's not meant for that. Now, what I will say is that there's also a mental component to this for you and your horse. Meaning if you have one fallback, one way to stop the horse, like, let's just say that you you use your seat and the horse doesn't do it.

So then you go to the emergency brake. What I'm proposing here is you need many other layers to stop your horse. You need to know how to stop your horse with one rein, with two reins, with your voice, with your legs, with your seat. If you have multiple ways, then you're not always going to that emergency brake, just like we don't go out the bedroom window really frequently, just like we don't use the emergency brake in the car really frequently as a way to stop the car. Finding that balance in between is really important. And for people who just trust that things will work. The problem with that is that if we don't go back and shore up the foundation with the horse, then these little sneaky rusty spots and training can come up. Plus, you don't have the benefit of having your body hardwired in how to get that emergency brake to work. Basically, at the end of it, we're training your first response, and because this is a horse and not a car, we're also training your horses. First response. This is why me jumping on a horse that's having braking issues isn't always the answer. If the horse's first response needs to be re evaluated on hard wired, then it's not just switching the rider that's going to fix that problem. When we think about training, the first response.

I think people are a little bit afraid to go back to these basics, so I'm going to share a few. I'm going to share three ideas with you right now. Number one, when I'm riding a horse, I don't have to think about how to grab the saddle horn. I have no shame in grabbing the saddle horn. I practice grabbing the saddle horn. If you go back and watch the YouTube series with Stacy is a video diary, Jack. You'll see that I'm riding with one hand on the saddle horn in a lot of the earlier videos. And when I work with people who are having issues with fear, I will frequently do lunge line lessons and have them let go. Grab the saddle horn. Let go grab the saddle horn. Let go, grab the saddle. Hahm a different hand. Move around. You don't want to think about where that is. You want your body to automatically have a hardwired response of how to reach out there and do that if you're going to lose your balance. Second thing that I personally do, I don't have to think about which direction I would take the horse's head if I needed to bend that horse around. Again, not common that I have to do this, but I always have the plan. Even on a horse that I've been riding for 2 years, I know because I'm always kind of following the bend.

So if there's a slight bend to the left, I know I'm going to take the horse all the way to the left. I also know that if I'm slightly going with a bend to the right and some emergency happen, let's say I don't know, a car crash happens outside the barn in this giant noise happens to my horse bolt. I'm going to bend in whatever direction I was already shaped. Right there is where the hesitation comes for most riders, and that's where riders miss the opportunity to stay safe. When you hesitate, you miss the opportunity to stay safe and get ahead of that problem. Third idea is a little bit more broad, but it's basically move your expectations higher. Learn how to grab for the saddle horn, keep your own balance, learn which direction like get hardwired, which direction you're gonna bend that horse's head, but then also go higher. Take your horses to a higher level. My online DVD that teaches WOA has multiple ways to stop the horse. One rain to rain, ground driving, using your legs, using your voice. There's got to be multiple ways you can do this so that you can have more steps than just going to the emergency brake. And ask yourself the question, could you stop and get off smoothly and quickly? When you ask yourself that question, because this is where a lot of people's physical fear comes from, is being able to stop and get off or get safe.

If you answer the question that you're not sure if you could stop and get off smoothly and quickly, then there's two things you need to do. You need to evaluate is that something you can change with the way your boot fits in your staff? Is there something you can change with your fitness level? Is that something you can change? What is there that you can control that would make this better? And if you've got a physical limitation where you can't physically move as fast as the 15 year old could, you also need to take the opportunity of basically fireproof your house, take your horse to the next level, move up to high school, advance your horse. In closing, I would love you if you're struggling with fear and especially fear of things you think might be danger. Go ahead and write down your fears and see which one of those fears points towards physical danger and then make a plan. And then just like your fire escape plan. Practice it. See if they point towards physical danger and then come up with a plan. Break it down into multiple steps. Figure out how you can keep you and your horse safe. And because this is a physical sport.

Think about how this is going to impact you physically and what changes you might need to make an address to become a stronger, more balanced rider. We're gonna talk about that in upcoming episodes. Thank you for listening. And we'll talk again next week.

If you enjoy listening to Stacie's podcasts, please visit Stacy Westfall dot com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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