What do you get for your money? 

       Have you ever considered what you actually get for your money when paying for a lesson?

Social media always seems to have questions regarding prices of lessons, which made me think about what MY clients receive in return for their money.

To begin with I am going to say these are MY offerings, I cannot and will not speak for anyone else here.

Riders tend to spend an awful lot of time and money on their horses, I should know! Once they have bought and paid for livery, bedding, feed etc, the attention often turns to training. Rightly so. I am going to speak from experience here when I say this, the first question USUALLY asked is HOW MUCH?

Now, I agree cost needs to be considered, obviously, there is no point having a highly trained horse that has no feed or bedding! So, how do you put a price on training?

Adding in here I am speaking from a rider’s viewpoint rather than a coach’s perspective, well mostly!

From my own point of view, I have always looked at the credentials of the coach I am thinking of approaching, do they put the horse’s welfare first? Can they offer anything other than ridden advice, such as nutrition as my horse develops? Do they understand my breed of horse? Have they any experience of dealing with my issues? Do they have a “one size fits all” approach? Are they invested in MY goals, not just that one session? How often do they offer training? Can I work my schedule around theirs if we click? Are they open to being contacted in between sessions if I come across a problem? What are their current clients doing? Are they doing the same old every session or are they progressing? The questions are many! BUT the one question i leave till the end…. WHAT DO YOU CHARGE? Why? Well if this coach can offer me everything I am seeking, my horse is happy and we make progress, the charge is then irrelevant, to me anyway. All these are highlighted in the diagram at the top of the page. 

I may not be able to afford to see that coach weekly, but a good coach will always give you homework and therefore if I only see my coach once a month, providing I have my homework done, once a month shouldn’t be an issue.

Less knowledgeable riders or those who require extra support may need to see a coach more frequently, in these circumstances perhaps asking if the coach could do a “package deal” or maybe just 30 min sessions to help reduce costs could be looked at, or perhaps sharing a session with someone. Another option could be remote lessons, you ride at home, no travel costs involved, your coach has you on their iPad/laptop etc and you learn that way, most coaches I know charge less for this as it doesn’t involve arena costs or travel. My final thought is video analysis, you video a schooling session and send it to your coach for feedback, again it is usually much cheaper as your coach can review it at their leisure, it also provides a great opportunity to review your ride yourself afterwards, watching it with your coach’s feedback is very interesting! If you can think of other ideas, please comment!

Coaching doesn’t need to be an expense which frightens your bank manager every time you bank transfer payment! From experience, coaches do really want to help you, but unless you discuss your problems, they can’t.

On a side note, please do not ever think the person down the road who charges £15/£20 a session is a better option, you get what you pay for, and those who undercut good coaches are 99% of the time unqualified, not insured, lack experience and are not invested in YOU.

So, when you consider looking at changing coaches, just take a moment to ask what they can do for you and your horse, and then ask "how much".

How does your everyday life affect your time spent riding?

With an average of 143 hrs spent doing anything but riding or equine related jobs, how do those hours spent elsewhere affect the physical and mental aspects of riding?

We all need to sleep, eat, drink, travel to and from places, work, relax, have family time etc, all these things can have a direct impact on the time spent riding.

How? Well, let’s take an average day for an average person who owns 1 horse, on DIY livery near to home, but also has a full-time job in an office 9-5pm Monday – Friday. We will call our person Lucy.

Lucy wakes at 6am to allow time to get to the yard to do yard tasks, due to work times she can’t ride in the morning, so gets all yard duties done before returning home, showers and gets to work, skipping breakfast, but having her caffeine fix to get her going. Already the morning has been busy, although Lucy is used to it, others wonder how she does it. Lunchtime Lucy pops to the local sandwich shop and grabs a sandwich and some snacks as she is now hungry, being hungry she eats her lunch quickly, swallowed down with more coffee. Mid afternoon another quick snack of something chocolate based. 5pm comes, Lucy drives straight to the yard, gets changed, tacks up and jumps on board. Its already 6pm, but she has a dressage competition this weekend and she needs to learn her test, so she gets her phone out to look at the test, she notices a message from someone and reads that first, then a social media post pings up on her phone, she reads that, she then scrolls to see some of her friends are also doing the competition this weekend, Lucy thinks she is already beaten as they always do better than her in her mind. Lucy’s mood has dropped and although she still wants to go at the weekend, she is already feeling deflated. After 30 mins of wandering around while she was scrolling, thinking, worrying, she finally looks at the test and rides through it. Her horse was a bit tense in the test riding, so she tries again, this time wanting a better outcome, but her own tension has created more tension in him, so the second test is worse. She keeps thinking “Sophie’s horse never has this problem” and gives up. She ensures her horse is washed off, dry and comfortable, fed his dinner and finishing the yard duties, before driving home at 8pm.

Lucy still must eat, but is too tired, so grabs some snacks to sit and eat while she “relaxes” with some wine to unwind while she scrolls through social media.

10pm and a bottle of wine is gone, several sweet snacks have gone while she was watching you tube videos of the test for the weekend, then comparing them to her last video test she did.

10.30pm, bed.

6am, Lucy is up again and repeats the same as yesterday.

This probably reads as a bit extreme, but honestly, I see this weekly, our imaginary rider here “Lucy” is everywhere. She works hard to pay all the bills, she wants to be successful, her horse doesn’t ask for anything, but she is always tired and finds switching off hard. Although she thinks this is “normal”, that is because that is all her mind and body know, she doesn’t realise her own lack of quality nutrition, relaxation, her wine to switch off in the evening, and all her other tasks she must do daily, are having a negative effect on her without even realising it.

The stress she carries is internal to her, but her horse senses it, she desperately wants to ride a relaxed test, but her horse just feels her tension and reacts to it, the stresses of seeing your friends entering the same competition have caused a spike of anxiety, the horse has no idea what’s causing this anxiety but cannot relax, the anxiety travels through her entire body to every extremity, unknown to her, but her horse feels every nerve twitch. Both physically and mentally Lucy has begun a training session on the back foot. The nutritional element means when Lucy is tired, she has no reserves to fall back on, her reliance on sweet foods gives her a hit of energy but it’s not sustainable, so her blood sugars will spike and fall causing tiredness and fatigue.

Having such a busy week, means that when the competition day comes although she is excited, she is running on empty. All this, alongside seeing Sophie riding round the warmup arena means she enters at “A” once again in a body full of adrenaline fuelled anxiety.

There are so many areas that Lucy could address to turn this daily routine from a ball of stress into a streamlined relaxed one.

The areas she would need to address would be:

1)      Nutrition – simply eating balanced diet, eating a nutritional breakfast and drinking more water (I know I sound like a food writer!!) would help her energy levels tremendously.

2)      Relaxation – Using relaxation techniques such as mindfulness, or just putting the phone away 30mins before bedtime would help massively.

3)      Alcohol – (yes I am going there!!) Alcohol is a depressant, although most people love a glass or 3 of wine, (or put your choice of drink in here…) drinking will affect your sleep, and your mood. If you like to have a drink on an evening, it would be wise to stop a good while before going to bed to allow the body to metabolize it and remove it from your system.

4)      Sleep - Although Lucy is going to bed at a decent time, if she goes to bed still stressed the mind and body will find sleeping and relaxing harder, alcohol adds to these issues, although she may fall asleep straight away, the stages of sleep will be fragmented.

5)      Social media - we all love a good scroll, but what you are exposed to will have an impact on your mind, whether that be positive or negative, so be aware of what you are exposing your mind to.

6)      Comparisons – Every single time you look at someone else and want to compare yourself to them, like Lucy did with Sophie, you are limiting your own beliefs. What you see in others is what you start to believe of yourself. So saying someone is better than you tells your mind that that is the truth! Your mind is your most powerful tool, so feed it well!! I am not saying don’t watch others, but never compare yourself to them.

7)      Focus – As lucy has limited riding time in the evenings, every second she spends with her horse must be focussed, not that she can’t chat to friends etc, but once she is riding she needs to make that time count, having some kind of plan – like learning a test – is excellent, but to make the most of it she must not allow her mind to wander off to irrelevant things, i.e. that Facebook post her friend posted, it’s irrelevant and has taken a chunk of her time away from the session.

This is a real example of a single person, with a single horse, giving it her all. Add in a family and the demands of that thrown into the mix…… it’s real and it happens, daily.

Owning and riding horses is a lifestyle, but it is still possible to have a normal life outside of that, it is all about how you apply yourself to the organisation of it. Life is for living and enjoying, horses are our therapy, so why do we allow ourselves to be balls of stress when we should simply enjoy it.