3 feedback methods for improving your horseback riding & breaking the habit of looking down: Episode 15

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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 horses in last week's podcast. I made the comment time plus repetition will create a feedback loop that you can modify. When I was listening back to the episode and going through the show notes, I thought I better expand on that so that you can understand what I meant by feedback loops. And this week I'm going to share my three favorite ways to get feedback from your writing so you can continue to improve. And keep in mind that each one has its own pros and cons. At the end, you need to weigh out which is the strongest one for you at this time, and maybe if you can figure out how to mix it up and do a little bit of each. That's what I do. I often recommend three separate things when people really want to start making consistent improvement in their writing. No one would be eyes on the ground. Number two would be mirrors on the wall and number three would be videotaping. I'm going to go through those in order and explain each one. Yesterday I just took a dressage lesson. So the eyes on the ground idea is very fresh in my mind and like a sound. It means a set of eyes, somebody watching you from the ground. The most common version of this would be a riding instructor.

When I went and took my dressage lesson yesterday, that's exactly what I was looking for, a set of educated eyes on the ground that could give me feedback. The reason I'm going to emphasize educated, you could actually do this with a different range of skills depending on what feedback you need. For example, I've had people who were teaching their horses to spin and they were taking lessons here. And I've told them before, you can teach a pretty small child to be able to identify whether a horse is crossing over or under with its front legs. And you can also teach pretty much anybody, horse, person or not, to be able to give you feedback like that. So that is one level of educated eyes on the ground. So you can go pretty low level educated eyes on the ground and still see a benefit. If it's something you can't see like in or haven't taught yourself to feel yet like the horse crossing over or under as it does a pivot. The higher education the eyes on the ground have. Then it changes your feedback loop. For me, when I was headed to this dressage lesson, I actually sent my goals for the lesson over ahead of time and said These are the specific questions I have regarding 50 meter circles, regarding lengthening the trot, lengthening the canter.

And that made it really specific when we went into the lesson, because even if you go for a one hour lesson and you have an educated set of eyes on the ground, there is a lot happening. And the more specific you are, the faster you'll get to where you want to be, for example. Jesse and I used to coach each other quite a bit with this type of feedback. And maybe I would say we watch my spin and I would spin and I would get done spinning and I would say, you know, how did that look? Well, first of all, my question was very broad. How does it look? So if he answered it with, you know, it look like it was a zero speed. It looked like it was, you know, this, this and this. I might have come back and been like, but was she moving or hind end around? Very much. And he might have answered, well, you know, overall it like this. But I wasn't just specifically watching that one thing. And that's very likely to happen. And we're gonna get into how Jesse and I solve that in another one of these. So when you're looking at eyes on the ground, the pros of having eyes on the ground is that typically you're going to be getting some kind of feedback.

The most common eyes on the ground situation is, is a lesson or a clinic. And you get feedback and feedback with an opinion and feedback with hopefully an educated opinion of maybe how you could improve what they're also seeing. If I was gonna list a couple of cons that go with this, it would typically be either cost or time because yesterday I had to hook up the truck and trailer load up, drive over an hour. Take the lesson, drive over and our home on load. So you're taking, you know, a whole three hours minimum. It's actually a little more than that by the time everything that really goes into it. So that would be the pros and cons of that. The. Next way that I really recommend people use to get feedback would be mirrors on the wall. I'm going to slow down. Mirrors the reflective things that you put on the wall. I'm from Maine and there are a few words that just haunt me, even though I've gotten rid of a lot of my accent. It's really funny. If I go back to Maine, I slip back into it. But though one of the words that my husband teases me endlessly about is this one. So those reflective things that you put on the wall. I learned to use those when I was in college, and it's really helpful. I now understand why so many dressage barns have them up because they work.

If you have a place where you can put some form of mirror on the wall, it will give you a snapshot of the horse's frame and your frame when you glance in it. And just like anything else, these are one of those things where it's like I put one up and then I was like, Oh, that's nice. I put another one up in a Oh, that's nice. And my dressage lesson yesterday, I was admiring that the whole end of the arena was completely done. I'm like, who? There's a goal right there. So it kind of does. At some point you're like, the more the better. But I'm telling you, even if you just have one section done, then it's very worthwhile. When I graduated from college and Jesse and I when we built our first barn, we actually installed them ourselves. I think I'm 99 percent sure the first set that we got actually came from his mom had been at a yard sale and remembered that we'd mentioned it and she bought some four-by-four, you know, they were not framed or anything. And we took them and glued them to a giant sheet of plywood and it looked better than a sounds. As I describe it. But getting the angle correct was a little bit interesting because they have to be a little bit tipped.

Depending on what part of the arena you want to see, some of the pros of the mirrors in the arena is that it gives you real time feedback, which means that as you ride past the feeling of what's going on in the horse's body and in your body is then captured when you glance over. You get a little snapshot that is in very real time. And I think that it's a very strong pro that you get to feel that because even the riding instructor is going to be on delay and they're going to tell you what they think it looks like, but it's not quite as strong a loop as when you see it and feel it yourself. If there are any cons, it would be, you know, the location where you could install them. They're pretty commonly found in indoor arenas, more so than outdoor arenas, but I've definitely seen outdoor arenas with them installed. I called a company locally and they were not interested in putting them in a building that was not, you know, temperature controlled like an actual dance studio or something. So I'll probably end up will end up doing it ourselves as well. I'm gonna guess the cost is relatively low. You can get different depending on what you're looking at. You can look online or you can go to Lowe's or Home Depot or somewhere and and find the materials.

The third thing that I recommend, and it's probably the one that I most frequently recommend is actually video. And this would be the solution that Jesse and I came up with, for the example I gave when we were talking about eyes on the ground when we were, say, spinning. So depending on what it is that I'm doing for a maneuver, Jesse and I frequently will rely on video for some of this now, especially something as intense as a spin. Now, in more general things, if I just want general feedback or he wants general feedback, we will still just do that kind of immediate assessment. But if it's something a little bit more specific and especially if it's a more intense maneuver, then Jesse and I videotape each other. Or if I'm out there and he's not, I'll perch my phone on something or I do have a tripod that if I remember to take it out there, I can use. And one of the pros of videotaping is you can watch it multiple times. And that's one of the reasons why. For that example of the spin, Jesse, I've gotten into the habit of just recording each other because the horses have a limited number of times that they can spin inside of a work session because it's very physical. And unless I'm very specific about what exact feedback I want and I can ask it very precisely, then it's stronger for me almost to have the video running because I can watch that multiple times and then Jesse and I can discuss it together.

While we watch it, but the horse doesn't have to put out the effort every time, one of the cons about it would be that there's not the immediate feedback like you get with the mirror on the wall or even with the riding lessons a little bit a little bit closer. The good news is that the pros are that it's you know, you can watch it multiple times. It's real easy with the smartphones now because they have such great cameras. And another thing that's really great about video is you can actually video and then you can compare them over time. One of the things that people get stuck on when I say video frequently is that they think about videotaping the whole ride, say an hour, and they think that they need to get some like a videographer on the ground to videotape them for an hour. If you have that, then maybe that could be good. Even Jesse and I don't videotape for a solid hour because there's a lot of downtime when you're riding and it's more moments that you need to grab. And if you challenge yourself to setup a tripod or something, you'd be amazed how you can cover like a like a a 20 foot diameter circle.

There's a lot that you can do in that range of what your cell phone can be zoomed in close enough on to see. And what I'll do is I actually put out a couple of cones that are just on the edge of the viewing lens. So I know that if I'm between these two cones, it's going to be on the cell phone screen. And again, the really great thing about that is it only has to be a few minutes, but you can have a spin you recorded, you know, early on and then a few months later you can compare that to something that you shoot, you know, more frequently. So you can compare Januaries to Junes and see the progress. And don't get me wrong. It's great for you can try to circle. You can work on spiral in, spiral out. There are lots of different things you can do because even if you wanted to work on a leg yield or half pass or walk to lope transitions or stop sliding, stop haul backup, all of those you can actually plan to do inside of a smaller section of where you're riding in between those cones and you can get really great feedback without even having that other set of eyes on the ground.

Now, if you really wanted to go all out, that thing that you can Google would be Pixie S.O or pick Seaham p.I. X I O. And if it's does what it did for me, which means the first time that you Google pick SEO, you will then be chased by ads all over YouTube and everywhere else you go for Picasso. But Picasso and there are a couple others out there of those recorders where you can actually like put a wristband on and you can ride and the camera follows you around. And now they've got him. So you can put your cell phone on there and the cell phone will track you around and video you. And so that's an interesting way, although that one's a lot more like a thousand dollars. So depends on what you're doing with it. But I've had a chance to see that in action and it looked like it was pretty cool. What I personally do is I mix it up. I like to do all three. So obviously, Jesse and I ride together. I just went for dressage lesson yesterday. So I've got eyes on the ground and I will be putting those mirrors up on the wall here shortly. And I do the videotaping because ultimately, at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is you're trying to improve your ability to read the horse's body language.

And the better you get at reading the body language and feeling what that feels like when you're on top of it. When you get that to where you can feel it in your body when it's happening, then you've got the ultimate feedback loop happening because the horse is always giving you feedback. Some of the more basic could be if you're trotting around to the right on a small circle, let's say it's a 15 foot across a circle and you're trying to the right just looking at the horse's head neck and seeing the shape of the bend of the head and neck. That horse is giving you feedback, feedback as to what's going on with its body, feedback to maybe what you're doing with your hands if your hands are bouncing and that's going to reflect in your horse's head neck. And, you know, if you've got the horse's head bent, you know, in a little kinked position because of what your hands are doing, you can play with moving your hands around because that horse is the ultimate feedback loop. I think one of the reasons why people look down a lot when they ride is because they're trying to close that feedback loop by visually seeing what they're feeling. But if you use one of these other three methods, eyes on the ground, mirror on the wall, video camera, you can begin.

Get that feeling in your body so that you can get that constant feedback without having to look down all the time. As I wrap up, I would like to say that even if you could video just five minutes a month, I think you would be impressed with the progress that could be made.

You could do five minutes of groundwork. You could do five minutes of riding. You could do five minutes of trotting the circle one direction. And if you videotape even once and if you videotape even once a month, you're going to notice a significant difference in the way that you're thinking about your riding. Now, if you really want to make some progress, jump that up to once a week. And again, it only has to be five minutes. I learned back in the day when I was showing a horse shows and you would show and this still happens at most of the reigning shows. You go in in your show and when you walk out of the arena, they actually have your video on DeLay getting ready to play back to you within just a few minutes. So you stand there trying to catch your breath. Your horse is catching his breath and you walk right over to a TV screen and you stand there and you both watch it together. So it was kind of funny when the horses watch it with you. But this is the earliest version of how I learned to get that feeling into my body by watching the video. Lessons are an amazing way. Mirrors on the wall are super helpful. Pick one or a mix of these. Give it a try and then let me know what you think.

Susan, I hope you get a chance to take that lesson. I did read your comment. I replied to it. And Martina, your comment. I saw that, too. Keep up the good work. And Camilla. You left that voicemail and I did get it. And I will be answering it. I think your question fits well into next season. Cathleen. Joanne. Tracey. Sarah. Everyone else. Everyone who's been giving feedback and encouragement through emails, through comments on the blogs. Thank you. Because that really helps me when I sit down to record these, to know that you're out there, that you're listening, that you're appreciating them and that you're getting actionable steps you can take to improve your relationship with your horse. If you have a question that you would like me to cover in this season while I'm talking about the writer's body, go ahead and leave a voicemail or send me an email or leave a comment on the blog over a Stacy Westfall dot com. If you want to leave questions that you're not sure what season they fit into. Go ahead and do that. I've got a collection of those going and I will work them in either during the appropriate season like next season's going to be the horses mind.

Or maybe after I get through the four-square model, I might do an entire season of Q&A episodes. It's just a thought. Let me know if you like that thought. Thanks for joining me today and I'll talk to you the next episode.

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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