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Riding/training books that influenced you the most

Jane Savoie “That Winning Feeling” - great book if you deal with things like show nerves or anxiety holding you back. Some great tools & visualization techniques.

Also love Sally Swift…and “How Good Riders Get Good” by Denny Emerson.

And “The Seamless Seat”. Great stuff in there too.

I don’t think there is just ONE book or even 2 or 3. But many, I posted my favorites having started this in the early 80’s

That said, if you read them closely, you will see common themes among all of them about training, riding and competing, managing them and our own riding aspirations.

There is a common thread in all of these if your read really, really closely.

Just have to find them, study, work at it… and make them work for you and the horse in your charge, which may all be a bit different from prior handling. Let that go and just go back, back, back and study all this. :slight_smile:

Horsemanship - Waldemar Seunig
Manual of Horsemanship, 6th edition - British Horse Society / Pony Club

These cover everything from horse selection, horse and farm management, training, as well as how to be a respectable horse person, and a decent human being.

Training Your Own Horse by Mary Rose and You Can Train Your Horse to do Anything: On Target Training: Clicker Training and Beyond by Shawna and Vinton Karresch

Sally Swift. I love her visualizations and imagery!! I haven’t read another book that seemed to speak my language quite like hers.

Sally Swift’s 2 Centered Riding books, and John Lyons’ Lyons on Horses. I read both early on in my horse career and the combination of centering on the rider and centering on the horse definitely jumpstarted my understanding of what I was getting myself into. Xenophon also was worth the read, because it makes it very clear that there is nothing new under the sun in horse training, at least in the last 3 millennia.

Podhajsky’s My Horses, My Teachers.

And Black Beauty. Even though it is fiction, one line in it had a very profound effect on me as a child, made me really think about that in relation to riding, to animals in general, and to a lot else, and has continued to grab me at every reading as the years go by. “Only ignorance! only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don’t you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness? – and which does the most mischief heaven only knows. If people can say, `Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,’ they think it is all right.”

Sorry if this is a tangent, but I’ve been trying to find a horse book that I had as a kid and I’ve come up completely empty. It was an instructional book about riding and jumping for kids, written by a riding instructor and the girl who was in the photos was riding a pony named Frosty. Not very helpful, I know. I loved that book and I don’t know what happened to it, but I’ve had no luck finding it whatsoever. Does it sound familiar to anyone?