Horse Riding Facts For The Newbie

I consider myself blessed, because I have been riding horses since I was a little girl and I now own my own horses. It is difficult for me to imagine living without them. They are like children: they make me laugh and cry, exult and rage, cheer and sulk. They get my love and they give me theirs. There is nothing so therapeutic after a hard day?s work as taking your horse out for a ride. The bond between my horses and I is deep, indeed.

For all the fact that horses are an inalienable part of my life, I am aware that many people are intimidated by horses and horse riding. To them, horses are huge animals of unknown danger and the thought of actually getting on top of a horse is frightening, to say the least.

If you are among those people who find horses scary, I understand that. You are simply reacting to horses in tune with whatever conditioning you have received in life. I would suggest, though, that you search for a horse that is undoubtedly placid and try out horse riding just a couple of times. You are almost surely going to end up changing your whole attitude.

The process of mastering horse riding starts long before you clamber into the saddle for the first time. As far as I am concerned, you start with the fundamentals ? and the fundamentals mean getting yourself a sound education on horses and their psychologies. You will make a good horse person only when you are very knowledgeable about horses.

Humans tend to humanize their pets, and that means horses, too. People are apt to assume that their pets are capable of the same reasoning and emotions as they are. This is probably one of the biggest initial mistakes novice horse riders make with their horses, and it can be a disaster in waiting.

Horses do not have human traits. They have equine traits. They are not capable of thinking, seeing, smelling, hearing or speaking like humans. As someone who wishes to master horse riding, this is the first major concept you have to understand very clearly. In this understanding lies the future security of you and your horse, which will have a direct bearing on the success of your riding efforts.

Because the horse is a herd animal, it has herd instincts: it is programmed to react, not act. You must have seen lots of scenes on television of herd animals like zebras and deer react to the presence of a predator. Horses are the same. This is not to discourage you from trying out horse riding, it is to caution you to reach out to your horse at its level, without expecting it to rise to yours. You need to think like a horse to achieve total rapport with your horse, and you need total rapport to become an accomplished master of horse riding techniques. The learning curve becomes very easy once the empathy is there.

Horse riding is great fun and a very fulfilling sport, but it needs to be approached right, or it will end badly.

Those who do make their preparations right give up after some attempts. Their experiences are not very good because their preparation was not very good. They took tumbles, wrenched or sprained some part of their body because they were not in tune with their horses. If you allow the experiences of people like this to throw you off horse riding, you are denying yourself a great deal of fun in life. It is not the horse that is at fault generally when mishaps occur, it is the rider, and once you realize that and do something about it, you are all set to become a master horse rider.

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About Heather Toms

Heather Toms is an article writer for http://horsehorses.net.
Horses are her passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge of horses with other horse lovers.
For more articles by Heather Toms and permission to reproduce these articles free on your own website, visit this link.

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