Ok. So in addition to finding a new trainer, I think you should reframe your goals so that you don’t measure success by going higher and higher. Try to slow down, enjoy the journey, and enjoy loving your mare as you work on your form and confidence at lower heights. She sounds like a great horse and you don’t want her to get frustrated or anxious.
I’m also wondering how often the horse is jumping. You say you take daily lessons, but you’re not jumping her every day, are you?
OP, how old are you? Much of this reads like teenage angst and being too focused on externals and what people think of you.
You have had your horse three months. You are still getting to know each other. It can take up to a year for a horse and rider to adapt to each other. You are wanting to go way too fast.
I agree that you should have been listening to both your horse and your trainer right from the start. It’s really important to know when a horse is just done, and when you need to push through and do a teaching moment. Not all refusals are a teaching moment. Many times the horse is just fried and pushing through leads to an accident and blowup, which can lead to long lasting behavior issues.
I agree your coach was very rude but I can also imagine that your behavior was frustrating and frightening him. At every step of this process from entering the higher class to doing that last jump and coming off, you have been going against his advice while things get worse and worse. If you aren’t taking his advice why are you his student?
Here are a few points.
You compete at a slightly lower level than you school at home, whether that’s jumpers or dressage. You dont compete at a level that maxes you out at home. Competition jump courses are always more complex and the situation is more stressful. So just because you can do it at home doesn’t mean you are ready to do it in competition. Dial it back.
Your mare is a person with feelings too. Listen to her. Your last horse went sour. You are on track to make this one unhappy too. Now you have your own horse it’s time to start learning about ground work, horsemanship, reading your horses mood. I recently saw some interesting videos on Wehorse from Karen Rolphe (not sure of spelling) about making sure your horse is always happy. This was stuff I’d already figured out about my mare, but it was interesting to see someone articulate it.
You have to stop thinking about how you compare to other people. You and your horse are on your own journey. Some horse and rider combos are better than you, lots are worse. Live with it. Good athletes have the ability to stay inside their own heads a focus on their own performance. If you get distracted by envy or insecurity, your own performance falls apart. You shouldn’t evrn see anyone else when you are in the saddle. This headset is harder for girls to achieve than for boys in our culture because girls are raised to be so hyper sensitive to social acceptance and to be constantly judging themselves. But if you want to continue competing you need to change your mindset and stop being driven by social anxiety. There’s lots of good sports psychology resources on this. Your horse and your horses well being should always be more important than your image in front of your frenemies. You will not be a real rider until you get there.
Listen to your trainer. Everything he told you over this weekend was correct and turned out to be right in hindsight. He knows your level and he can read your horse. Be guided by him. If you don’t want to listen to him, go to another barn and another trainer. But listen to that trainer.
So you screwed up this weekend got hurt and learned a lesson. So now you go back knowing you need to listen to your trainer and listen to your horse. You will need to figure out how to repair the damage done to your relationship with your trainer and your horse, both.
Frustration has no place around horses and is the surest way to ruin a horse and get hurt yourself.
None of this is a huge setback. Now you know a lot. You need to work on basics, listen to your horse and trainer, not treat your horse as a jumping machine but as a person with feelings, and figure out how to get rid of the social anxiety that is at the base of all your problems, and indeed at the base of how badly you feel now. People won’t like or respect you more or less because you can jump a couple of inches higher.
Whether you experience this as humiliation or a learning opportunity is entirely your choice. You are clearly brave ambitious and have the skills and horse to be riding at a fairly high level. So you pushed yourself and your horse a bit too far too early in your relationship. Now you know something. There is no reason to feel humiliated and frustrated if you own the mistake in judgement and come back with a plan. You tried, it was too soon for this height, you didn’t listen to your trainer at multiple points, you got hurt. Admit where you went wrong, think about what was going through your head to make you take wrong choices, and figure out a plan that will help you make better choices next time.
No, we jump three times a week, at times two, once during the week and it’s usually low and twice during the weekend but it can vary on the days but we focus a lot on dressage.
I am not condoning your trainer’s actions or methods. However, I am with Scribbler here. I will say that your mindset is completely wrong if you want to actually be a good horseman. Jumping big has NOTHING to do with being a good rider or horseman. I can teach a monkey to jump 1.50m on the right horse. Look at all the videos of hyper prepped horses cranking over the standards.
I suggest you really look at what YOU want from all of this. Is it really about ribbons? Why? Why not? Why do you ride? What pushes you?
Using myself as an example, when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s I would spend hours galloping and jumping out on XC with my Junior Jumper becasue I was having a ball! We trail rode, we even ran cows. Then in the late 1980s I rode in the A/O jumpers and the Prixs. I was out to prove something to everybody and be damned how I got there. That was the only thing I focused on until it completely burned me out because it never meant anything once I left a show.
I moved to eventing in the 90s and found the fun part again. I also began to really dive into all aspects of training, management, physiology,… since I was doing the old long formats by myself. I didn’t have a trainer other than for individual phases. It was here I found that while I LOVE jumping big fences at speed, I LOVE the process of developing a horse from the ground up. I LOVE building a relationship of trust and confidence with an EQUAL partner whether in dressage, XC, or stadium jumpers.
I am building up a new buddy to jump big but I am in no rush. I started him at 3 from scratch. We jump around at 1.10m, work 1st level dressage, and I have competed him maybe 10 times. And I am having the BEST, most FUN time of my life on a horse. I love taking lessons with my trainers, I love going on trail rides and chasing deer or elk on my boy.
I still spend hours studying vet medicine, nutrition, conditioning, training,… I do it because my goal is to jump big but also to retire with my buddy and we can sit on the patio drinking beers, watching the world go by (he can’t fit on the patio). So, I have to make sure he will always be sound, healthy, and happy.
My “brother” placed 7th in the World Cup finals riding with Rodney Jenkins almost 40 years ago. And today we have the best time just building up horses laughing and talking about life because, as he says, “We do it because we love it. We don’t have to prove anything to anybody.”
Change your trainer: you no longer suit each other. Trainers are the people with knowledge and it is their job to explain, support and help their clients. Clients are the people seeking knowledge and so need clear explanations, good support and effective help.
There are some things OP said, however, that are slight red flags. A riding lesson every day suggests she is a very focused, goal orientated person who wants to ‘win’ over ever higher fences and is highly committed to achieving that target - but ‘winning’ with horses isn’t just about ribbons at shows. Cyclists can win medals in races and then can toss the machines into a shed until they want to race again. Equestrianism is different. It is also about building a relationship with another sentient being, about being on a lifelong journey of self development and self knowledge, one of endless daily discovery of new skills and experiences. Maybe a disastrous, disheartening and totally crappy week is time for OP to reassess precisely what she wants from her riding and how to achieve it.
I would add that part of a learner’s job is to listen to their trainer and accept expert advice even when they disagree with it, such as when they are told they are not ready to do something. That advice, after all, is why we pay trainers. Rather than being a bad trainer - my immediate thought - he could simply be just as frustrated as OP, who perhaps demands he do more than he honestly feels able to offer. That is why I think that the current trainer no longer suits.
(ETA written as Scribbler and JAyers posted. They both say what I have!)
I haven’t gone against his advice before, I always listen to him and apply it but when it doesn’t work out he gets frustrated and says I’m not trying hard enough, today was the first time I asked him and put my foot down on not wanting to leave the mare with a refusal, I would have been fine if even he or someone else jumped her as long as she had left on a good note.
My last horse didn’t go sour, he’s actually happy in another barn with as a lesson pony who loves his job. I sold him because he couldn’t go past the 1.00m due to his height and breeding, we never had any issues with him in the past present or future.
I always listen to him but I’ve gotten frustrated at staying stuck in the same level, I feel like I keep taking steps back during his training when with his training aid I was able to do amazing work. We have had issues in the past were I do something wrong and he leaves mid lesson though but I’m afraid leaving him means leaving everything he offers.
I do know where I went wrong, I do think if I was having a bad day and my trainer was mad since the beginning I shouldn’t have even started jumping just to hear him yelling that if I got it wrong he was leaving because that only but a lot of pressure on me but I don’t think I’m pushing the height. I think maybe I should focus on technique for a while until I’m able to navigate technical courses better because that was my downfall as well as listening to my mare and making her a bit softer and more responsive as well as our communication skills since that was also something that went wrong because we saw very different things when jumping and that lead to the fall.
And i would never treat my horse like a jumping machine, I’ve seen it before and it’s horrible and she’s already an older girl so I’m always making sure not to jump for too long and to make jumping lessons as short as possible to make sure theres no stress for her joints. And at least in my barn you are looked down on if you can’t advance past 1.10. My plan for now is to take a week break from lessons and just do dressage with my mare until I can recover from my current mental state.
“And at least in my barn you are looked down on if you can’t advance past 1.10.”
Your barn atmosphere is stupid. As Jack LeGoff once said, “I can build a 2’ fence that no horse could jump.” Height is a bullshit method to compare ability. Last week I set a course of 2’ fences that when I jumped around, I realized, “Shit, this is a seriously tough course! I have to actually ride!”
Athletics is honestly about 99 per cent mental state, and in riding that includes the mental state of the horse.
You will not proceed much until you are able to reframe your responses to set backs.
In your inner heart you need to look deep inside and let go of all anger, humiliation frustration and blaming your coach. Look only at what you did. Step by step. What choices did I make? Why did I make them? What could I have done differently? What will I do differently next time?
Newsflash: every single person I know has a honeymoon period with a horse for a few weeks or months and then things go downhill, and it takes up to a year to get really solid agsin. So accept the feeling of going backwards as part of the process. It isn’t really backwards. It’s establishing a relationship.
So this is your first “real horse” after 4 years on a lesson pony. Big learning curve.
OP you are still coming across as very defensive and kind of bratty in your most recent post. That’s OK. It’s not fun to discuss this kind of thing in public.
But in your inner heart alone you need to start accepting and thinking constructively about your own mistakes in judgement and your motivations.
I am assuming you are a teenager, and this is asking alot, but it’s also one of the reasons that becoming a good rider is so useful in helping teens mature emotionally (I speak from experience).
Agree on the stupid part.
It’s true (from what I read on COTH) that many competitive barns for juniors are structured (inadvertently or not) to bring out the worst adolescent traits of insecurity, dependency, externally motivated goals, and consumerism (new horse new saddle etc) because it’s a great business model to keep families that csn afford it constantly dumping money into training showing commissions etc.
There is much less money to be made in creating autonomous good riders and horsemen.
That said, I have no idea if the trainer really feels this way or if it’s just peer pressure from other teen frenemies.
OP, first off, I appreciate your vulnerability in seeking advice. We ALL go through rough patches and bad rides. Even pros! They just have the ability to hide it more easily .
I don’t want to repeat sentiments that were already shared, but I got the impression that you tie a lot of self-worth in your riding to how high you jump and the barn culture does to. First, how high you jump do or not jump does not mean you are a bad rider. I am concerned that the barn culture looks down at 1.10 and below. Riding is a journey and it’s about learning. We learn at different paces and different ways—you should never compare your progress to others (I realize that’s easier said than done). There is just too many variables at play. If the program culture is one that looks down at people jumping 1.10 and below, then quite honestly, that’s another reason I would consider a change.
I also got the impression you are trying to move up and move up fast. I don’t know you and your riding ability, nor your trainer, but generally speaking, if someone says you aren’t ready for XX height, then you aren’t. It’s not a bad thing. You should not try to rush yourself up, esp with a new horse. That’s how people get hurt and confidences get shattered. I’ve seen it too many times. If your riding mentality feels impacted or not it’s best, it is 100% in your best interest, the horse’s, but also your partnership to take some time and go back to basics and lower fences for awhile. That does not make you a bad rider. That makes you a smartrider.
I hate the bullying and gaslighting that is so common in equestrian sport.
I hate the push to be bigger/better rather than enjoy the moment.
Both are tactics to keep clients and have them feel the need to spend more $$$ and buy expensive horses/new horses.
As an aside: sometimes when things just don’t feel right, it is a subtle hint that something my be mildly physically wrong with your horse. That they are holding back / not really looking for the jumps themselves. Something to consider.
Oh don’t worry, that’s one thing I have always checked on her for. She just got her teeth done, she had a chiropractor out last week for her two month check up as well so she’s not in pain. But I think I’ll just take the week or maybe even this whole month to just do dressage and ground work and just play with her to recover a but from yesterday
I would edit out the location if I were you. Sleuths will figure out who your trainer is and you don’t want that to happen. Or they’ll figure out who you are.
I agree that height means nothing. It is how you jump not what you jump.
Why don’t you go and have a lesson with your friends instructors?
I don’t mean lame, but something as small as they rolled funny or slipped in turn out. I think when you ride well, you might feel something is “off” and assume it is your riding, but it is really that your horse’s response time or way of going is just that little bit different. A good coach would help you through it, but bully you through it.
Ugg….this right here is a terrible attitude for a barn to have! Although not surprising seeing as your “trainer” has what seems to be childish temper tantrums ….I put trainer in quotation marks, because quite simply, any trainer worth his/her salt, would never act like yours is! Leaving midway in a lesson because you aren’t “getting something” , telling you to “leave your horse after a refusal and a fall” (unless you’re hurt and that’s completely different)….no sorry, a GOOD trainer would either get on the horse or modify the exercise so you can finish on a good note!
He’s got you bamboozled into thinking you have to stay….you don’t! Honestly, jumping 1.10 or bigger isn’t a measure of how good you are (been there done that, now I happily cantering around 3ft and 3ft3 hunters….it’s all perspective). Honestly,it’s what you do in between the jumps that matters, a good trainer for instance doesn’t say “go faster” they should say something like “more impulsion out of the corner, that way the distance will come to you, and if you have the engine you can fix a long distance”……if I’m having trouble, my trainer will help by counting the rhythm out loud that I should be on , as generally it means I’m forgetting to count!
Honestly, run don’t walk to the nearest exist….do not look back, get yourself a better trainer that will bring out the best in you! Don’t rush in jumping bigger, especially when you’ve only had this horse 3 months! The honeymoon period usually wanes at 3 months and honestly, it takes about a year to really get to know your horse. Plus, it sounds like you’re moving up awfully fast….especially if you’ve just got off school horses! Some people never get to 1.10 or bigger….and that’s ok……we do this because we love it not to “please other people in the barn”
As I read it, your trainer doesn’t have it in him to train you anymore. Go find another.
But! I have some hard, but perhaps helpful recommendations for you, too. Upon reading more responses, I think I echo what others said, but I put it a tad more bluntly and get specific about how this looks from your mare’s perspective (as best I can infer) and what things you can change, right now.
You need to become a better horseman if you are going to stay in this sport.
From your description, that would look like:
– Riding longer than 5 years (a helluva lot longer).
– Riding more on your own and taking fewer lessons.
I think pros who have full training clients (who pay them a lot, but whom they have to do some “hand holding” in the form of constant lessons and emotional support) start to resent those customers. And they are the best-paying ones! Plus, they are often trying their best, as it sounds like you are. But they can’t ultimately give you timing and feel or fitness. They can’t help you on course when you ask for an impossible distance or can’t find the track to a bending line. These belong to you.
The pros who have active show barns and have their clients jumping a lot aren’t always the guys that teach less experienced riders well. You may have just seen the flash and the showing and made the innocent mistake of choosing the wrong barn. No harm, but take your lovely, generous mare to a different program where the pro will help you work on your basics until you can be the supportive rider for her that you want to be.
–Quit measuring your success based on the height of the fences.
If I were your pro and I saw your horse bailing you out over and over, and you said to me “yabbut, my friends are jumping bigger,” I’d be frustrated. If I don’t give you what you want and tell you that you need to step back to better flat work or developing a better, more accurate eye or your own equitation, you’d be unhappy because I was holding you back for reasons that you couldn’t understand, being an ambitious newbie. If, on the other hand, I left you jump bigger, I’m letting you make mistakes that screw over your horse (or worse). And if I found you the mare-- one I chose for her experience and generosity with a rider that needed to catchup with her education-- I’d feel I owed her perhaps a bit of “protection” from you. That’s a nasty position to be in.
I’m not sure I understood the remark about “Hey, quit complaining, I’m just giving you, the paying client, what you want,” sounds like him abdicating responsibility because he can’t help the mare. I have seen pros do this before with clients who can’t seem to see things their way.
And when he “let” you jump with friends on Sunday, why did you opt to do that if you and your mare had not been doing well all week? Why is all of this about what he did, what the mare did and none of it about what you did?
–Think about your mare’s experience, take responsibility for that and make her experience your first priority. Other than your wanting her to not end having refused, and reading your statements about loving her, I don’t see you say anything about how you are willing to change your ride or choose a different program for her sake. Sure, you’d move barns because you don’t like how you are treated. But what do you want for your horse?
When you get her to a fence ridiculously wrong, she stops out of self-preservation. If you get her in badly to a triple combination, and she goes anyway, that’s a pretty bad experience for her. After all, she has to save her ass three times in a row, not merely once. If you have been riding her all day without enough impulsion, you set her up to fail… and she really has to bust her ass through a big combination. But it sounds like you started creating this problem from the beginning, well before you got to that line. So she’s understandably not confident about the way you’ll present her to the next fence after that scary experience. But instead of really focusing on your flat work and doubling-down on your commitment to finding the right track and distance to the next fence, you put gun her at the fence and ask her to leave way too long! And to be clear: It takes a lot of mental toughness to change up your ride and ride better after almost dying in a big combination. But, I promise you, that’s where the success is. It sounds like you don’t yet have the depth of experience to be able to change your ride mid course this way. But when she finally stopped at the fence with the long distance, it’s because you keep screwing her and she’s not sure she can get to the other side of a fence you point her at with the rides you are offering her.
When you decide that you have to jump her again so that she is somehow taught that she doesn’t get to stop, that assumes that you can give her a better ride. That’s why your pro lowered the fence-- to make it easier for both of you. But if you can’t give her a sterling ride to that-- soft and accurate-- you aren’t making the next fence more inviting to her than was the one that you made impossible for her. He might have been telling you to quit your jump school on that day because he knew you couldn’t deliver that great ride, and so would be repeating a negative experience for her. And he might have known that she didn’t actually have a stopping problem to be corrected; she was merely doing what she had to do to stay safe. Why make her work harder to fix a problem that’s not properly hers?
But know, too, that every rider has this kind of experience… where bad goes to worse. You know that that means? It means there is a hole in your foundation somewhere-- either a lack of education on your part of the horse’s, or a problem with fitness or soundness on either side. The good horseman has the humility, concern for his horse and knowledge to willingly step back a bit and remediate.
– When the fences get above about 3’ or so, accuracy and pace become exponentially more important. That’s because the horse actually has to leap to get over the fence; they can’t just jump them out of stride. So when a client wants to jump at that level without the skill to do that, it’s a bigger problem than when they are “too ambitions” in moving up from, say 2’ to 2’6". The consequences for the rider being wrong at those lower heights are much less for the horse.
Good luck. You don’t have bad information from this shitty week. What you do next with that information is what counts.
I have considered it but he’s a bit more on the expensive side and I don’t know if he would teach me properly. Usually he rides his students horses at least 3 times a week and I was once told that’s a sign of a trainer that the students horses do all the work.
I would take a month off from jumping, absoluately, and definitely, definitely, not drill dressage every day. One day dressage, one day a hack around the barn, one day dressage, one day off completely, etc.
OP, what are you doing with your time, other than school and riding? Maybe you would want to do some things with your time that are more positive for you, so you can ease up on the angst and self-doubt and and anxiety about peer pressure. The barn should be your happy place, and you don’t seem happy. So, spend at least some time in whatever is your happy place.
Where are your parents in all this?
Just to clarify usually my horse doesn’t bail me out, I do actually ride her well 
and I’ve done amazing courses on her that were all well above 1.15-1.20m. But I am incredibly frustrated because no matter how high I jump I don’t feel like I’m riding properly and I’ve told this to him multiple times that I want to feel like I’m riding properly when jumping higher but he tells me I’m just imagining things or that whatever he says nothing will change my way of thinking. I have told him that if I can’t ride high then I need an explanation why so that we can work on it but he just brushes me off and refuses to explain what needs to be worked on before jumping higher.
I do agree I did wrong jumping but on Saturday when I had a bad day my trainer insisted it was fine, that we did it in the end. And on Sunday I told him that maybe we should lower the jumps but he told me that if he lowered them he wouldn’t jump me high ever again and he didn’t want to bother the other trainers by moving the course. And when I tried to ride a bit slower, softer, I get yelled at that I need to go faster so I’m just confused and I have no idea what I’m doing wrong. I do get that she isn’t the problem but the last thing I wanted her to leave with was that refusal, I wanted her to see that she could get over the jump confidently and over the course without problems even if it wasn’t with me but my trainer said no, he didn’t want to get on.
I’ll just be riding dressage/flat work this whole week maybe playing one or two days, maybe this whole month, to help our relationship a bit and help us get back on the same page before adding small jumps here or there but I just don’t want lessons until honestly my mental state is better especially after what my therapist said about my current self-confidence level. I just feel humiliated, angry at myself for almost hurting my girl, and helpless because I have no idea how to remedy the situation. I don’t even want to go to the barn because I feel like crying thinking about seeing everyone again.
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