Don't Hold Your Breath

Take a quick poll anywhere you find a bunch of horse people, and you’ll find that the two things riders fear most are coming off their horses and getting run away with. There’s a common solution to both of those problems--don’t hold your breath.

When horses or people are startled or nervous or concerned in some way, they hold their breath. When they do that, any rhythm or relaxation they had go right out the window. Rhythm and relaxation are the first rungs in our training tree because they’re so important to anything else that you do with your horse. Rhythm is the one way you can control a horse. So that’s where everything starts.

When you practice your heeding groundwork with your horse in an arena or a round pen or even when you first go to get him out of his stall and groom him, you need to breathe in a steady, relaxed rhythm. Your posture follows your breathing and, as you do your groundwork, your horse is following your posture. So if your horse gets nervous and holds his breath, you have to make sure to watch your own breathing. Don’t hold your own breath. You just keep breathing in rhythm and relaxation. If the horse breaks his rhythm, you don’t interrupt your own rhythm by holding your breath or doing anything startling.

So in your groundwork, you want to make sure your breathing is always rhythmic and relaxed so your posture says rhythmic and relaxed. Then you keep showing this rhythm to the horse until he develops the habit of following it. You make your rhythm a safe place he can always go back to if he gets nervous or startled. You’re also developing the habit of staying rhythmic and relaxed yourself no matter what the horse does. That’s important because people come off horses when they hold their breath. When you hold your breath, you tighten your stomach, brace your back, and clamp your legs. That tension in your body intensifies the horse’s motion and bingo. You’re bounced off on the ground.

The hard part about preventing this from happening is training yourself to breathe when things are falling apart. So as you’re heeding your horse from the ground, you start building the automatic responses to the horse’s nervous reflexes that are going to help you when he startles while you’re on his back. You’re just going to breathe right through it and not “notice” it with any change in your own rhythm.

Whether you’re working your horse from the ground or the saddle, you can also use a little mantra like “Breath-Ride-Every Stride” to help yourself develop the habit of rhythmic breathing in the cadence you want. You can’t hold your breath while you’re talking or singing. So a little mantra like this or a little refrain you can sing is a place you can go back to in a crisis to help yourself recreate and stay with the rhythm you want.

In our riding classes, we sometimes play music or use a drumbeat to help everyone keep the rhythm as they ride down the sides of the arena and turn through the corners. If a student gets in trouble, the instructors may repeat a phrase like “sit up and ride” over and over in the correct cadence to help the student regain the rhythm she needs to take back control of her horse. Figure out what works for you and develop it as a habit to help you focus on your rhythm.

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