Learning Resource Recommendations for students
It’s been happening on a regular basis now that I’m chatting with a student about what they just learned, and I’ll say “do you have any interest in reading about, listening to, or watching videos about this stuff?” And more often than not, the response is something along the lines of: “Yes! I need more of this! Please give!”
And then I say, “great, I have so many good resources I can recommend… but I don’t have a list of them. I should put it on my website for you.” And then I pull out the book I always recommend first because I keep a copy in the tack room, and that’s as far as we get. Until now! Behold.
Ride With Your Mind Essentials: Innovative Learning Strategies for Basic Riding Skills, by Mary Wanless - the book I always recommend for those new to rider biomechanics. My tack room copy is full of notes and tabbed so I can refer to sections quickly after a lesson to help make a concept easier to grasp. Riders everywhere will appreciate the clarity, brevity, and well laid out concepts with easy to follow descriptions, questions at the end of each chapter, and extremely accurate diagrams. The RWYM method is the one I draw from most when teaching rider biomechanics, so everything you read in this book is reflected in your IRL lessons with me.
The Horse Behaviour Handbook, by Abigail Hogg - the book I recommend for folks with less than 30 years experience with horses. Even I, with more than 30 years experience, learned a thing or two about horse behavior while paging through this informative and colorful manual. I particularly liked the idea that social relationships among horses are way more important to them than I ever gave them credit for. It would take decades of only private lessons to glean what you can absorb from a thorough read of this book.
Language Signs and Calming Signals of Horses: Recognition and Application, by Rachael Draaisma - the book I recommend for anyone looking to better understand what horses are conveying when they move their ears, turn their head, and even blink. There are so many nuances to a horse’s communication that go straight over our heads, and Draaisma helps clarify what it all means, which is a huge help to our interactions with them.
The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion, by Wendy Williams - the book I recommend for anyone interested in a fascinating journey through the evolution of the horse. New archaeological discoveries explain a lot about why horses are the way they are today. There’s a lot of talk about bones, but Williams makes it all relatable to our experience of horses as we know them now. I learned SO much about horses, and I thought I knew a lot!
DressageTraining.TV - the subscription website where Mary Wanless, with the technical assistance of one of her coaches Peter Dove, puts out high quality videos demonstrating the Ride With Your Mind method in action. The fee is commensurate with the product, and serves as a valuable supplement to lessons for those who learn well from watching videos. There is a mix of live coaching demonstrations led by Mary and some of the other coaches, explanations off-horse, explanations on-horse, and actual lessons with RWYM coaches and a students with wide variety of skills. There are also videos covering horse training, rider body awareness and strength/flexibility, and more. The part I like most is watching the coaches help various riders make changes to their riding and seeing the horses change positively in response.
Mary Kaminski at EponaHeart Counseling - Full disclosure, this website is run by my partner-in-horses, Mary Kaminski, LGPC. Mary is a phenomenal mental health practitioner. I always recommend her to my students who are dealing with any kind of trauma that might affect their relationship with horses and/or riding. Mary and I share our herd of horses, so if you come for lessons, you may very well run into her. It is not uncommon for horse people to have trauma related to horses, and Mary is particularly well positioned to understand the horse-human relationship as she is a horse person herself.
Clicker Training Horses with Connection Training - Hannah Weston and her mother Rachel Bedingfield outdo themselves with this vibrant community and expansive trove of learning they call Connection Training. I have learned a tremendous amount from their video courses (I have access to them all, and they are constantly adding more) since I signed up in early 2019. The content emphasizes a positive and balanced approach to clicker training horses, and they have an impressive array of ways to take in the learning, from their new book, new podcast, interactive monthly Q&A’s, busy forum, not to mention hundreds of hours of easy to understand step-by-step how-to videos. Highly recommend!
Modern Horse Training by Alexandra Kurland - Alexandra Kurland just came out with this book in 2023, and it’s IMO one of her best. It is dense! Alex is probably one of the best horse trainers out there, if not the best. Her focus on the welfare of the horse and environment combined with her relentless pursuit of balance and harmony in her students and their horses is truly unparalleled in the horse world, as far as I know. There may be other really great trainers, but can they teach what they do the way she does? I would argue not. This book is the bible of horse training, and I’m so glad we finally have it! Shoutout as well to her podcast Equiosity, which I talk more about in my blog post Things I’m Listening To.
There are many more resources I can point to that have helped me and my students toward better horse riding and stewardship, but for now these are the big ones. Mary Wanless has several other books, as well as another website and a whole trove of DVD’s that are not part of the DressageTraining.TV website - all of which I recommend highly.
Happy learning everyone :)
*edited 3/31/20 to include #s 6 and 7, and edited AGAIN 11/1/23 to include #8 :)