Episode 352: Survival Riding—What It Looks Like and Why It Happens

Episode 352.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 352.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
All you have to do is picture a situation where the horse escalates, usually due to the situation that they're in. Like outside energy happening in the horse escalates, and just picture a rider who doesn't seem equipped. Like you can tell they're just barely managing this and they scrape by. If you've ever been that rider or seen that rider, you've seen survival riding.

Speaker2:
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.

Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacey Westfall and I'm here to help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this episode, I want to describe a term that I often use with my students, I'm going to share what it is, how it shows up, and how to break the cycle. I almost mentioned it in last week's episode about the challenge of choosing change. I actually described the situation without giving you the term that I use. Here's a summary of what I said last week. The challenge of choosing change is that you're going to feel like you're the one causing problems that will feel completely different than when you're put into a situation like the deer jumps out, and to save your life. You grab, hold, and shorten up the reins in that moment when the deer jumps out. A lot of times you won't feel guilt because it's a safety choice, but that very same rider a lot of times will avoid pulling on the reins when they're in the arena because they feel guilty about using techniques that apply pressure to the horse. But notice they're not avoiding it. They're just postponing that until they're put into a situation that challenges their safety. So the term that I use for a rider in a situation like that where the deer jumps out, is survival riding. I actually did a lot of this survival riding when I was growing up. I had a friend whose mother bought and sold horses and we would go out, grab a horse, jump on it, and head down the road without knowing anything about the horse.

Speaker1:
We didn't do any groundwork. We didn't even ride for five minutes in an arena. We just got on and headed down the dirt road. As kids, we just assumed that we'd figure it out. And that's what led to a lot of survival riding. I remember getting about a half a mile down the road and having the horse rear and turn and bolt for the barn, all in one fluid motion, and then a lot of times it went something like this. One person decides to trot, the other horse decides it doesn't want to be left behind, so it decides to trot. And then in a short distance, both of us would be out of control trying to survive, which I obviously did, because I'm here talking with you. But I don't recommend survival riding as a long term solution. As kids, I even went back and asked my mom about a couple of these situations and she said, we just didn't know. And it's true. We just didn't know any different. We weren't skipping steps that someone showed us. We just flat didn't know. And I think this is actually one of the main causes of survival riding in the beginning. The rider just doesn't know. I have a podcast, and I've mentioned it several different times on the stages of competency.

Speaker1:
The beginning stage is unconsciously incompetent. You don't know what you don't know. And that was definitely my childhood riding horses. The next stage up from that is Conscious Incompetency. You become aware that you don't know, and people often switch from the first stage to the second stage with some type of accident or scare that raises their awareness. I've told the story before on the podcast about the first time that I thought about riding bridles, and I took my barrel horse out of her regular bridle and decided to ride her in a halter. I was riding on a back road alone, and then met up with an acquaintance of my mother's. We started riding together and long story short, we started trotting. The horses got excited and it led to loping and then a total run away. In that moment, I was in a survival ride. I pulled as hard as I could on the lead ropes and nothing happened. I ended up clinging to her neck until she finally slowed down much, much further up the road. That is a very clear version of survival riding. I've seen many versions of survival riding over the years, both out on the trail and it shows. All you have to do is picture a situation where the horse escalates, usually due to the situation that they're in. Like outside energy happening and the horse escalates. And just picture a rider who doesn't seem equipped.

Speaker1:
Like you can tell they're just barely managing this and they scrape by. If you've ever been that rider or seen that rider, you've seen survival riding. Now, where my childhood survival rides were driven mostly by just not knowing, the second version of survival riding that I see very often happens with adults, and it usually stems from guilt. In this version of survival riding, the rider is aware on some level that danger is lurking. Maybe they have had that moment where they couldn't get the horse to slow down as quickly as they wanted to. They've got this little lingering doubt as to whether or not they could control the horse if somebody took off loping away from them on the trail. Maybe they've even read an article, or watched a video, or taken a lesson and had an expert say, this is what you need to do. But then the rider didn't implement the change. So the very common cycle that I see here of the survival ride is you've got the incident happens. The rider seeks help. The rider tries the exercise. The horse complains. I call it asking questions, but a lot of times it might feel like they're complaining when they're saying, really? Do we have to do this? And then the rider doesn't like being the one causing the problems. So on that day when the horse is like, really? I don't know if we should be doing this, I'm not sure.

Speaker1:
I have some questions here. And the rider doesn't want to be the one causing problems that day. The writer will often think, well, you know, the horse is being pretty good, so they skip the exercise. Let's add some numbers to this. Let's say that this rider had a similar incident to my run off, where they were riding somewhere. They couldn't slow the horse down. They were headed back to the barn. Another horse sped up and on a scale of 1 to 10, in that survival ride moment, the rider pulled on the reins at an eight, 9 or 10 and managed to get the horse stopped and survived. But normally when they ride the horse, the horse normally responds to a cue at a two or a three. But the rider had this moment where they realized the communication was not clear, so they were a little bit scared, or they were wanting to be a little bit proactive. So they went and they got help. And the instructor recommends that the rider practices trot to halt, halt to trot transitions with the goal of having no walk steps during that lesson. This sounds like a reasonable thing, although the rider is not able to execute it. During that lesson, they get some pointers and then a week later the rider goes out to try it, but she feels guilty while she's practicing, so she does it a little bit, but never gets to the point where there are no walk steps.

Speaker1:
And by the way, some of this guilt is coming from kind of feeling terrible about pulling at an eight, 9 or 10 during that survival ride. So she decides that she'd rather stop the horse with her seat, and that seems to be working in the arena, so she decides to just stick with that. In this scenario, there's a couple things I want to point out here. The first is that in my childhood example and in this example, I used the numbers eight, nine, and ten for how hard we were willing to try to stop. Often in survival riding. The rider is forced to pick between bad and worse. We're going to talk more about that in a minute. One of the bigger differences between my ignorant childhood versions of survival riding and this second version, is the introduction of guilt. When I was a kid, we had a lot of not great situations. I am not encouraging that, by the way, but we basically just didn't know and we just hoped it worked out. And that might be why sliding stops fascinate me now, because I can actually stop. However, in this adult version, most often when the rider goes out riding again, unlike the childhood version of me, it was like, oh well, that happens. I don't feel any guilt. Let's just go ride.

Speaker1:
The adult version often involves the rider going out to ride again, and they've got this lingering fear from that survival ride, a fear that that runoff or inability to slow down will happen again. Anxiety around their ability to handle it, they know they just barely manage last time. So there's this underlying fear of it happening, this underlying anxiety about whether or not they could pull that off again. And then they also will, a lot of times have this growing awareness that they also feel guilty about doing the training exercise at home that was recommended. Like I said in last week's podcast, the challenge of choosing change is that you're going to feel like you're the one causing problems. So let's discuss how to move forward. Well, first of all, if you've been in this situation and you've listened this long, that means that you're still willing to stick it out and try to improve. So congratulations. Even better. I'm also going to tell you, I'm not saying that you need to practice pulling on your horse at an eight, nine, or ten. I think that sometimes people accidentally think that if that's what they had to go to in that survival ride, that that must be what they need to practice. No, we're not going to use the spooking or the scary thing to then practice. We're not going to go to the eight, 9 or 10. Typically, what's needed to break this cycle is that the rider needs to decide to commit to doing more advanced work.

Speaker1:
Let's go back to that recommended trot to halt. Halt the trot transition. What's going to happen is that for a trail rider like I was when I was a kid, it would have seemed almost pointless to me to build that skill set. But I can tell you now, as a pro, that when you, as the rider can smoothly execute this and your horse can stop in a balanced Way without being surprised. That means your horse also has a new skill set that will actually translate to things like riding down the trail. So although that might look like something you would do in a show situation in Western dressage, it's also a skill set that's going to help you out with just flat, more communication, and even better, what's going to happen if you decide to commit to doing some kind of skill set? Building like that is that you're going to be presented with the chance to examine your guilt, that guilt over asking the horse to do something that they're going to complain a little bit about. Again, I prefer to call it the horse asking questions. And yes, the questions can be do I really need to keep doing this? Do we really need to do it again? Can't we go back to the barn now? Can't we be done now? So sometimes the questions are going to have a flavor of offering you something different.

Speaker1:
What I want you to hold on to is asking yourself the question, do you feel guilty doing ten repetitions of this? Do you feel guilty doing 20 repetitions of this? How do you handle it? If you make a mistake during the 10 or 20 repetitions of it. How do you handle it? If your horse asks a tough question. Here's what I find interesting. When I use the numbers eight, nine, or ten in the runaway example, it's easy to imagine someone being run away with in a dangerous situation. And if you thought it would save your life and your horse's life, imagine you're about to jump into traffic and you're willing to pull in that moment at an eight, nine, or ten. What I find interesting is that people will get it in their mind in a situation like that, that pulling that hard is what's required. But what if I told you that the secret isn't pulling that hard? It's practicing a transition that's a well balanced version of that situation. Okay. Think of it like this. When you picture a sliding stop and raining, the horse is running pretty fast and then stopping balanced and easily. Can you see how that horse's ability to physically run that hard and then stop well, actually demonstrates not just a physical skill set, but it also demonstrates an emotional skill set and a level of understanding.

Speaker1:
So when we go back and you imagine the situation of this out of control runaway example, the horses movement in that example was an eight, 9 or 10, which is why you had to pull at that level to try to interrupt it. When the horse has advanced training, when you systematically train a horse. The horse can learn how to move at increasingly higher speeds, but not escalate emotionally. So when you increase the horse's level of understanding, you actually get the chance to decrease how loud or big that cue is when you skip the advanced training because you're just a trail rider, or because you only want to do blah blah blah, you actually skip the practice that makes pulling at an eight, nine, or ten a thing of the past. Let me say it differently. You solve the problem ahead of time by choosing to do more advanced work, which in the long run is also more kind to both you and the horse. A survival ride isn't any fun for the rider, and it isn't any fun for the horse either. If you feel guilty when you're riding and somebody asks you to do 10 or 20 transitions, double check your skill set. Maybe you need to brush up on how you're going to execute this and double check your mindset. Skills are things that you can practice and get better at executing. And often the mindset involves adopting a belief that the skill has a long term benefit for you and the horse, and that is what makes it worth practicing proactively.

Speaker1:
That leads into something that I talked about back in episode 335, The Rider's Body. When your body tells a different story because when you ride with guilt or fear or uncertainty, especially if you try to pretend you don't have that, and you just hope that by riding down a different trail or going to a different show. Your horse just won't escalate. Those underlying emotions, they're going to show up in your body. Your horse is still going to read that low level tension or the way that your breathing changes. That's still a part of your cue system. So I'm going to replay that episode now because I think it dovetails well with this one. And I'll talk to you again in the next episode. In the last episode, we started exploring the rider's body quadrant of the Foursquare model. In that episode, I focused primarily on the mechanical skills or the cue system. Today, I want to dive deeper into how your entire body communicates with your horse beyond the technical skills. Let's start with a non horse concept. Think about learning to swim. You probably walked into the pool or the water and walking around was fun. Maybe you made some giant leaps and you could feel that moment of being suspended. And then someone said it was time for you to learn how to float.

Speaker1:
Maybe it was your swimming instructor or your parent and they said, just relax, you'll float, which sounds magical. So you give it a try. But the first attempt usually doesn't work because you don't know how to float. So your body tenses up when you're trying to float. So you sink and you start to panic a little bit. Or at least that's what I did, which causes you to tense up even more. So you start to sink like a rock, and then they say, that's okay, try it again. And they sound absolutely crazy. When you're struggling to keep your head above water, it feels like relaxing would lead to drowning. Now, scientifically speaking, the instructor is correct. A relaxed Body literally has better buoyancy. When you relax, your lungs can fill up more. And that makes those air pockets that help you float. Plus, strange fact, tense muscles actually weigh more. Relatively than relaxed ones. But knowing this doesn't make it any easier to learn to trust the process, because your body has survival instincts and your lack of experience overrides that logical understanding. But once you experience even just a moment of floating, it gives you a way forward. And eventually when you learn how to float. You can't believe how hard you are working against yourself. I love this analogy because there's an element of this that's happening when you ride your horse, and I'm going to call that element belief.

Speaker1:
I remember teaching my own kids how to swim, and I chose a quiet body of water, not a raging river. My arms were underneath them and I would hold them up, and then I would slightly reduce how much I was holding. This allowed them to experience both the safety of my support underneath them, and the sensation of whether they were truly floating or not. And that moment when they realize I'm doing it was really magical, because even though they almost instantly sunk, because they got excited, their bodies felt it just long enough for them to be able to recreate it, and suddenly floating became effortless. I hope you've had the experience of riding a well-trained horse, one that was confident in the situation and confident in what was being asked of it. The opportunity to ride a horse like that is like floating in the swimming pool with the instructor's arms under you. Riding a horse like this makes it easier to believe that you're capable of riding, because if you have wobbles in your belief or in your skills, that horse has a steadiness that comes from experience. What makes riding challenging is that you are navigating your own skill set and your own mindset or belief, as well as interacting with a horse who brings their own skill set and their own beliefs into the conversation. But before we go there, think about the loop in your own body.

Speaker1:
When you were learning to float in the water, your body physically reflected your lack of experience and your lack of understanding. But every time you experience just a fleeting moment of floating, it became easier and easier to believe, which made it easier to physically execute. This feedback loop between a physical skill set and belief is exactly what's happening in the rider's body quadrant. Your mind creates a feedback loop with your body, and your horse is reading your body. Your body reflects what's happening internally for you. It reflects your confidence or your doubts or your intentions. You might actually have the technical skills that you need, but if you have emotional patterns like fear or uncertainty running beneath the surface, I like to say they're going to ooze out of you. They will color the experience. They will distort or influence the way your horse physically receives your cues. When I think back to learning to float when swimming, the first step was believing it was possible. After the first time you tried it and you sunk. The first step here in writing is becoming aware of your physical experience so you can determine whether you have a skill set gap in you or in the horse, or whether you have a mindset issue that's reflecting in your body. Let me wrap that up in one word awareness. Let's keep going. If you've had the chance to ride a well-trained, experienced, reliable horse sometimes called a schoolmaster, it's easy to believe because that horse carries a high level of skill and experience, which gives the horse's mind a lot of confidence.

Speaker1:
And this confidence transfers to you as the rider. Just like my confident arms under my son, I'm confident he can do it. And I'm confident that he's safe, and that is actually a felt experience between both of us. But for a moment, let's go to the other extreme. When I'm starting a horse under saddle, which means I'm the first one to ride them, no matter how high my physical skill set is and how much I believe there will still be an imbalance or a wobble. Because the horse is part of the equation and the horse lacks experience. The horse's lack of experience is a reality, no matter how much I do to prepare them for that moment, I can do ground work and ground driving and ponying. There's still going to be a difference for the horse when I mount up. And I know most of you aren't starting horses under saddle for the first rides, but don't tune this out because this is critical for understanding the rider's body quadrant. At this moment where the horse's skill set is low, Lo, it impacts my physical state. Notice I didn't say it impacts my physical skillset. My technical ability is the same. So how does it impact my physical state? Here's what happens when I get ready to ride this horse for the first time.

Speaker1:
My mind tries to anticipate what the horse might do. My mind offers me challenges that I might experience and solutions. My mind focuses on every possible problem based on everything the horse has done in groundwork and up to this point. My mind weighs the options of mounting up today or waiting until another day and even two minutes before my foot goes into the stirrup. And when I swing my leg over their back for the very first time, my mind is still weighing all of this as I sit on top of the horse for the very first time, my mind is making a quick evaluation of the horse's physical and mental state, as well as my own physical and mental state. Another way to explain this is that I'm in a state of high awareness. This is not a state that I want to stay in permanently, but it's very beneficial in those first few rides or any time the horse reports to me that they are concerned. This heightened awareness allows me to detect subtle changes in the horse's confidence or understanding or responses. This also explains why I frequently dismount during this stage. I literally ground myself by dismounting on purpose and double checking the situation. I'm not dismounting because something went wrong. I'm dismounting as part of the process.

Speaker1:
Every time I dismount, I decide whether I'm going to mount up again, which puts me right back at the beginning of this cycle of evaluating everything I know up to this point. And this deliberate check in process helps me maintain that clear, clean energy that's so important when I'm working with a horse that has minimal experience. If the horse is showing signs that they don't understand something, I would rather address it. I would rather recognize it and choose to help them instead of ignoring it and pressing on. Whenever I'm in new territory with a horse, my mind engages in this dance of evaluation and decision making. I don't take this as a sign of weakness or doubt. I think it's a normal and necessary part of recognizing how my body and mind work together, especially when the stakes are high. I often remind riders, so here's your reminder. When you mount up on your horse, you are trusting them with your life. Evaluating how things are going and making decisions based on what you've been observing is smart. I don't ride fearless. I ride prepared. What I see with riders a lot of times is that they don't separate these two different experiences. They don't separate the physical skill set. As in, what would I physically do if the horse startled or spooked? And they don't separate that from the physical state. Am I in an appropriate level of readiness for the situation? Instead, a lot of times what riders do is they feel their body get tense and then they assume it's purely a technical skill.

Speaker1:
I need to put my leg in a different position, or I need to work on my timing. And technical skills do matter, but so does your physical state. I also like to remind Riders like you that your emotions are literally oozing out of your body. Becoming part of your communication system with your horse. This is backed up by science. Emotions aren't in your head. Your thoughts are in your head. Your emotions are in your body. They physically show up in your body with the hormone releases, the muscle tension, your breathing pattern. It even changes your digestive function. Emotions create measurable physical changes. Fear increases your heart rate and your adrenaline. Anxiety often causes shallow breathing and muscle tension. Confidence relaxes your body and improves your coordination. Your horse is reading these physical manifestations with remarkable accuracy, and it is influencing how they respond to your rain or your leg. When I explain my high level of awareness in the context of starting Colt, it doesn't sound that unreasonable, but when riders experience a very similar cycle to what I just explained, they often think something's gone wrong. So let's look at this from a few different angles. First, let's look at that high level of awareness I was in with the cult, because when I'm in that, I look at it like it's what I need to keep myself physically safe, I accept it.

Speaker1:
It feels like it's appropriate for the situation. And because of that, it feels like preparedness or readiness. But for me, it also has an element of that feeling of floating. It's not a negative experience. I am highly focused, highly aware, but I'm balancing all of that physical awareness with belief and deep breathing. Now, again, most of you aren't going to be starting cults, but I use this extreme example Ample because it makes the challenge easier to see. However, I do talk to a lot of riders who are dealing with fear, specifically the fear of falling off after they've already experienced a fall. So if you've ever had a fall or an unplanned dismount, think back. Was it a skill set gap or a mindset gap? In my experience, it's almost always a skill set gap, and it's often a skill set gap that the rider is now trying to close by believing more. That would be like me climbing on a colt without proper preparation. Now, when I prepare, I can't guarantee how the first ride is going to go, but I can get it pretty darn close. Or let's say it this way. That first ride can be made a whole lot worse by not preparing the horse. If that's true, that indicates a skill set gap on the horse's part. With most falling off stories that I hear, there's either a skill set gap for the horse or the rider.

Speaker1:
So that means the horse may have needed more skills, or the rider may have needed the skills to support the horse in that moment of confusion. Here's how I separate them. The physical skill set. That sounds like what would I do physically if the horse fill in the blank, spooked, bolted, bucked, whatever that is? Do you have a physical skill set answer to that and also physical state? Am I in the appropriate level of readiness for the situation? Can you see how there's two separate things going on here? The appropriate level of readiness actually changes with the skill level and the situation. So when I'm riding the Colt for the first time, I need a high level of awareness compared to riding a horse that I've known for the last five years, who's proven to be predictable in the situation that I'm in. In that case, my level of readiness is dialed way lower than it was on that horse's very first ride. Look at it this way. Belief isn't just in your head, it's in your body. Again, I'm not saying that you should ride every ride with a high level of awareness, but I am saying if your horse has given you warning signs, believe your horse. Those warning signs or whatever led to you falling off, there's a good chance that that's your horse expressing their concern or their lack of understanding, or you expressing your lack of awareness and your lack of how to support the horse in the moment.

Speaker1:
You have to remember that your body is a feedback loop, not just for you, but also for your horse. Because your horse reads your body, not just your rein Q or your leg Q, but your actual physical state. So let's go back to that list of all the things my mind is offering me during that first ride on a Colt, and look at how this loop is present for me all the time. Even in less heightened situations, I'm anticipating what the horse might do. My mind is offering me the possible challenges and the possible solutions. In that heightened sense, I'm focused on every possible problem based on what the horse has done in the past, because I really want to create a solution. I'm weighing the options about what I'm about to do, and I'm making a quick evaluation of the horse's physical state and mental state. My physical state, my mental state. So now let's go into a totally different example. Let's say I'm showing in western dressage. And let's say that I've practiced the test before or I've shown in this before what this loop looks like here is, as I'm preparing for the next time I show, I'm anticipating what the horse might do based on facts from the past.

Speaker1:
Using this knowledge, I'm also predicting possible challenges and I'm creating solutions. So I'm weighing the options. I'm evaluating the horse and myself inside that moment. Now let's go really specific. Let's say that I've shown this horse, and the last time I showed the horse, I went home and I realized that there had been this heightened sense of energy for both of us at the show. And I also realized that it really impacted our trot to lope transition. So now as I prepare for this next show, I recognize that I'm going to need to be more focused during that trot to lope transition. I might even recognize that last time, I didn't even focus on the transition because I was trying so hard to remember the whole pattern. So actually, during that first time I rode the test, I just kind of assumed the trot to lope was going to work. But because of the added excitement and the show and me, something didn't really work. The horse actually needed more support. They got mushy. And because I didn't give the support, the horse rushed or got quick and uncollected during the transition. This is something that hasn't been happening at home, but it happened here and I'm thinking back on that. So I use that knowledge and this cycle of awareness as I'm preparing for the next show, but I also use it as I'm showing. So again, let's say that I had that show where I was excited or nervous and I didn't support the horse.

Speaker1:
When I say I didn't support the horse. I want you to also hear that I was not evaluating my horse and myself in the moment. Let me illustrate that. So let's pretend the next time I go to show this horse, I'm more focused and more present because I'm anticipating the possible problem of rushing. I'm also creating solutions. So even though my main focus might be on improving the trot to lope transition, this next time I go to show, I am probably evaluating myself and my horse as we enter the arena. Is my mind rushing ahead on the pattern, which is what I did last time? Or am I here with my horse Feeling them in the moment and supporting them. So if I trot down the center line and halt. Did they stand willingly during the halt or did they feel nervous? Do I feel nervous? Am I rushing that transition? Do I need to adjust how I leave that halt and better prepare for that first corner that I'm about to ride? Can you see that long before I ever get to the transition that didn't go well last time. The trot to lope, because I'm thinking about how to solve that. I'm actually much more present because I'm evaluating the horse and myself in the moment. What I hope you take away from this episode is that there is an ongoing feedback loop between your thoughts, your interpretation of those thoughts, and how they physically manifest in your body.

Speaker1:
And remember, this feedback loop isn't private. Your horse is experiencing it too. Think about it this way when I'm on the colt for the first time, my heightened sense of awareness doesn't register as fear because I interpret it as necessary information. My interpretation of this high level of preparedness shows up in my body as readiness instead of restriction. But when a rider feels that same high level of awareness and labels it, I must be doing something wrong or this shouldn't be happening. The interpretation that they create creates the tension pattern and that communicates this uncertainty to the horse. So the thoughts themselves aren't the problem. It's actually how you interpret them and how that interpretation shows up in your body. Your technical skills absolutely matter, but they are not the only thing that your horse can feel. When your aides say move forward, but your physical state says, I'm not so sure about this. Your horse receives mixed signals. The first step is recognizing the difference between your physical cue system and your physical state. The skilled riders that you admire aren't just technically precise. They've learned how to float between the physical cues and the internal belief. That's what I have for you this week, and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall. Com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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