People have visions of working with a trainer as an all out sweat fest in which they crawl out and are unable to move for at least a week, when they inevitably go through the whole thing again. 

 

Any decent trainer will tell you giving someone “a beasting” isn’t hard. 

 

However helping someone to move better, use their body better, reduce pain and in my case improve how they use their body on a horse requires more knowledge and skill. 

 

I don’t want my clients to be unable to ride for days after their sessions because it’s too painful or they’re too weak. That’s counter productive, as the purpose of the training is to improve performance on horse not leave them knackered. 

 

Sometimes of course you may have some soreness (Dom’s) and yes sometimes the sessions might be tough but that’s not a rule for how every session will be.

 

Sometimes I can struggle with the fact that people expect to feel really tired at the end of a session and they may not. 

 

However the key to improving performance for riding is in the subtle shifts that happen. That spook they sat to, that walk to canter transition they nailed? All aided by the training process that enabled them to use their body better.

 

Sometimes the magic is in what isn’t happening, for example less pain. Often you don’t realise until you don’t train for a couple of weeks and you start to feel old pain patterns creep in that the training had reduced this. 

 

My job as a trainer is to make you better overall but specifically in relation to your riding. How you move your body as a unit, how it moves under load and how it reacts to outside forces are all part of that and that’s what I focus on rather than how much you sweat or hurt.