Getting It Right

“Now I am used to the scale of the Academy project, I have tentatively decided to get it out of my battered little notebook and into the real world.

I am really aware that I am a very small fish in a very big scary pond, and in the start I had no clue where to start. If I had a fabulous competition record in the UK to fall back, on or a string of successful pupils out competing, I would have been more confident about the launch.

From previous experiences abroad and in the UK, as well as from my own teaching and training, I learnt that the actual content was good and worked well.  However, I felt I needed to test drive the entire system I was offering and that’s how we ended up with the Academy Road Test.

The Academy Road Test

Initially I decided to do it for a few months and so approached some clients to help me out. It was at this stage Kari came on board: I had met Kari at a riding school where she came for a lesson with me after a ten year break, so we took it nice and easy to start with. The more I taught her the more I realised she must have ridden to a decent level before and it wasn’t long until it transpired she was a Chiropractic doctor and a very passionate one!

As I later learned, Kari evented on ponies in Ireland, both at national and international level so had a good grasp of what I was asking her to do to improve her posture and those of the other riders at the Academy. She has since attended a Ride with Your Mind course with Mary Wanless to learn more about the biomechanics of riding, and is also in the process of setting up her own clinic in Hampshire.

A learning curve

The road test became a great learning curve for us. The biggest difficulty was to come up with a system that was user-friendly; i.e. feasible for busy horse owners or full-time working riders. It’s great if you can get riders together for a week-long boot camp where they leave their everyday lives behind, but creating an umbrella of supportive coaching services that works well when incorporated into a normal rider’s schedule has been very challenging.  

The solution?

The Academy is based on the idea that you work towards certain skills by going through very flexible, fully personalised training plans. We don’t set any fixed times and days or use default training methods. Every rider is assessed individually, as is the horse, and the training plan is tailored to suit the needs of the combination.

The next step

Sometime during the road test someone suggested I film the whole system in action to make it easier to follow, which is how the idea of making case studies emerged. Over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of videoing and now have a mammoth task of editing the footage so it can go on the website!

In my next blog I will introduce you to the riders who took part and how they used the Academy to improve their riding in their case studies.”