Lesson 1: Grooming and Tacking up
Choosing a riding academy
Because there are virtually no certifications for riding academy, beyond the basic OSHA-type inspections by various state governments and/or agricultural inspections, it is difficult to know if you are at a well-run, safe place to learn to ride with knowledgeable instructors. While most of us can tell if a piano teacher knows one note from another, very few people have any experience at all of what good horsemanship is, never mind whether it is being taught well.
So what can you do?
1. If you live in the vicinity of a college offering equine studies (and there are only a couple dozen of those nationwide), call and ask their head instructor to recommend a local riding academy or lesson barn.
2. Visit your local tack shop—or preferably more than one—and ask more than one associate which lesson facilities he or she would recommend and why.
3. Visit those you have decided might be good, reputable places, dedicated to teaching you to ride—even if they are also dedicated to showing horses. Some barns identify themselves as ‘show barns,’ which generally means they will be better for you after you’ve at least gotten to intermediate rider skills and have a nice horse you would like to show. Some, however, are equally adept at teaching beginners and like to do it, knowing that today’s beginners are tomorrow’s horse owners.
4. When you get there, watch a few lessons. The instructor should never berate a student. The instructor must display patience, a lot of patience, especially with the beginner classes. See if there are smiles on the riders’ faces. See if there is respectful interaction between the instructor and the students. It will be very difficult at this point, but try to determine whether the skills of each student in the class have improved even a bit from how they were when the class began. Because learning to ride is such a slow process, though, it may be that these improvements are not visible to you at this point. It would be a good idea to take a knowledgeable friend along to help you make these determinations.
5. Stroll through the barns. Are the aisles clean? Clean in a barn isn’t the same as clean in a house. There will be some dirt from recently picked hooves, and a few wisps of hay and so on. What you shouldn’t see is a pile of trash in the aisle, more than one pile of ‘road apples’ in any horse’s stall, wet and stinky stalls, dirty saddles and bridles laying around and so on. Check that there is water in each horse’s stall, maybe not a full bucket (they do tend to drink at will!) but none should be empty, and none should have a film on the top of the water, nor be full of sodden hay or otherwise indicated no one cleans the buckets very often.
If the lessons appear to be informative, fun, and safe, and the barns appear to be clean and horses well kept, the next stop is the office. In a large barn, there may be staff and even an office manager. In a small barn, you will probably find that the office, if any, is tiny and will be staffed when possible by the owner or head trainer (sometimes the same person) or barn manager. (Sometimes, in a very small barn, the owner is all three, although she or he may have day labor to help clean stalls and turn horses out and bring them in, although often ‘working students’ trade labor for lessons, too.)
A lesson barn inspection document of some sort should be available, whether from the state agriculture department or other agency. Ask to see it. In some states, there are ratings, from A on down, for riding academies/lesson barns.
Ask to see the Liability Release: if the barn has none, then it is flying under the radar screen and is probably uninsured and you just plain don’t want to ride there. The release will state that you realize riding horses and/or dealing with horses is inherently dangerous, and beyond reasonable care by the barn of your safety and so on, you assume full responsibility for your safety. You will have to sign one to ride there; if you are unwilling to sign one, then you are not ready to learn to ride. It IS dangerous, inherently, to work among and around animals that weight a thousand pounds and have hooves and teeth and a kick that makes Mike Tyson’s right arm look like overcooked spaghetti. Accept it, and choose a barn that limits any possibility of danger as much as humanly possible, and you’ll have a great time on horseback. Deny it, and ‘cowboy’ around and act like you’re immortal, and you might find out just how mortal you really are.
If the barn had no release, you’d be out of there by now. So assume you’ve seen the release. Before you sign it and sign up for lessons, there is one more indication of reputability and quality of teaching that you’ve got to run down: the way the lesson program is run.
You need to know what the lessons will cost and how they are to be paid for. And this, alone, can give you major clues as to what the barn is about.
Most medium to large barns will run semesters (often 10 to 12 weeks, with allowance for summer camp weeks when regular lesson programs are tough to run, what with all the kids on site all day), or will ask you to pay for a month up front. Both of these methods are reasonable, with exceptions. If you are allowed only one ‘make-up’ class during a semester, forfeiting any others you might need to miss, you might want to consider that that barn is more interested in its cash flow than in your learning to ride. Or worse, that it cannot keep students any other way because the teaching is so bad. The first issue may not offend you, although I think it bespeaks a less-than-passionate horseperson and do you really want that to superintend your experience? The second issue is, however, crucial. Being allowed only one make-up class during a month is reasonable, by any standards. When these make-ups are scheduled, they should be at the discretion of the instructor to be sure you are going into a group for that lesson that is neither too far below nor too far above your current skill level.
As for costs, private or semi-private lessons will be more expensive than group lessons, but when you begin, until you can reliably walk and trot and canter a little, they can be a good investment. The individual attention will get you into riding and give you a better understanding of the horse and how it operates—and your part in that—much quicker and more thoroughly than would happen in a group, especially if the group is five, six, seven or even eight.
CAVEAT: No reputable barn interested in safety and learning will schedule one-hour group lessons with more than six regular students, allowing for one rider doing a make-up lesson, also, at the instructor’s discretion. If there are more students in a group than that, then there should be an assistant instructor also in the arena. And, too, be sure the arena is big enough to handle six horses at once without having any of them in danger of running into jumps or each other before rider steering gets to a minimally competent level. How do you know this? Look. Horses should be able to have a ‘personal space’ around them on all sides of at least four horse-lengths, although students may have a hard time actually keeping that distance. But it should be possible. Some barns have huge arenas that can accommodate 20 horses and maintain adequate spacing. If they schedule hour-long group lessons with any more than 8 horses, run from there as fast and as far as you can. No human instructor can possibly give good value to that many students—especially beginners—in a vast space where some may be out of earshot, making it doubly dangerous.
When you are watching lessons, it is likely that people who own their own horses will want to ride, or hack, them. If they are allowed into the arena while lessons are going on, watch how that is done. If they are required to ask the instructor for permission to enter, you will know the barn is operating in a respectful manner at least, with lesson students given preference; after all, lesson students only have an hour a week, generally, on a horse while owners can ride at will. Once they owner and horse are in the arena, watch to see if they yield to the class and work in the same direction—very important!—that the class is working in. Why is this important? With beginning riders, especially, it is important to limit confusion and sensory input; the riders have an awful lot of information coming at them, and they are in an unfamiliar setting on a ‘vehicle’ they do not know how to operate. Worse yet, it’s a vehicle with a mind of its own; you don’t want rude riders scaring the horses, either. It is essential for barns and instructors to do everything they can to ensure that beginners are not overfaced (given tasks that are beyond their skills at the moment), overmounted (given a horse that is too much horse for them to ride at the moment), or intimidated by those to whom horses have become routine. Putting beginner students in needlessly dangerous situations is inexcusable (these would include but are not limited to riding in an unenclosed space, having trash in the arena, allowing children to climb the fence around the arena, allowing unnecessary noise and hullabaloo to occur anywhere near the lesson arena), and so is subjecting them to needlessly intimidating behavior on the part of riders who should know better. After all, everyone was a beginner once.
If all your investigation leads you to believe that this is the riding academy or lesson barn for you, by all means sign up for a series of lessons. At a very small barn, you may have to agree to take a particular group lesson or private lesson time, but you are unlikely to have to pay for it ahead of time; these barns generally work on a pay-as-you-go basis, which works well for adults’ busy schedules. But of course, they do ask a commitment, since they will be holding that spot for you, and would like a call as far ahead as possible if you cannot make it on any given day.
You will be sore after your first lesson; the muscles used to ride are a whole different combination than you will have used for any other sport. So that’s normal. You should be exhilarated because, for the first time, you will have been able to ask a horse to walk, direct its movements, and stop it again. You should not be frightened (beyond the excited kind of fear) or demoralized. You will not do everything right the first time. Actually, you will probably have maybe one ride a year in which everything is perfect. But if your instructor has contributed in any way to feelings of worthlessness, seek a different place to learn.
If you are going to work on this alone, be aware that you will not always succeed in what you set out to do on horseback, and give yourself a break. If it were easy to ride horses, if there was never any fear involved, the whole world would ride them. And even pre-automobile, not everyone could ride. Or wanted to.
You do. But remember, you are in a tenth of a percent of the world’s population. You don’t do it perfectly? So what? It’s a miracle that humans can ride the huge elemental beasts at all, and there you are, doing it. Congratulations!
