BILL— it’s a tough combination, and we can only hope that the rider has a lot of patience and does not have unrealistic expectations of how quickly things can be fixed. A lot of riders who get in this situation do so because they don’t realize how complicated the relationship they need to build with their horse and the sophistication of the aids that they need to do that are way beyond what they are used to.

There are a few ways to look at this. The rider needs to discover the co-ordinations between and among all the aids. She needs to learn that asking is not the same as getting an answer, and that she can exert a wide variety of pressures and tempos of her aids which will produce different results. She needs to learn that there are a lot of additional responsibilities to attend to without getting hype-focused on just one. But most important of all (with her instructor’s help) she needs to recognize when something good happens and be able to reward it by softening.

Probably the best advice is to finagle a way to get her onto an easier horse— even for a ride or two— where her aids will be more likely to produce the right results. Then she will at least know what she’s looking for as she tries to decipher her regular situation.