“More impulsion!” Most of us have heard our coaches cry – usually accompanied by a hearty clap or imitation of riding forward. But what does ‘impulsion’ actually mean to you, your trainer, or the judge scoring you? By listener request, we’re breaking down riding terms that have mystified riders for years. Caroline is joined by Rob Van Jacobs, a USEF “R” Rated judge for hunters and equitation. As a judge, trainer and rider, Rob interprets the differences between rhythm, tempo, pace, and speed not as semantics but as part of a show ring strategy. Understanding these terms can improve your communication as a rider or trainer, and influence your decisions moving forward. For instance, knowing ‘tempo’ can help you select which show rings your horse can thrive in and offer important considerations for buying horses. We’ll also cover: Why pace is more helpful than speed in the jumper ring The difference between natural vs. created impulsion What “hacking” actually means and how it relates to recovery and fitness How to make a good first and last impression on a judge (yes, judges do notice if you forget to pet your horse!) Caroline and Rob also dive into some hot topics like whether or not judges need to have equivalent riding experience to the classes they are judging and where we may need to draw the line on draw-reins.

Josh Nichol has helped countless riders develop healthy partnerships with their horses through his method of Relational Horsemanship™. He joins Caroline Culbertson on Equestrian Voices for a thought-provoking conversation about how meeting your horse's needs can forge deeper connections, encourage softness, and reduce spooking. Here is a transcript of their conversation – listen to the full episode here. Caroline Culbertson: What do we need to understand about how the rider may be contributing to a horse’s frequent spooking?  Josh Nichol: You have to recognize horses are not just worrying about ‘the thing’ that they’re spooking at. They also learn to worry about your reaction to ‘the thing’. I don't think we put enough energy on this. We know it with people; if you’ve ever had a boss or somebody in a working environment who gets upset really fast when you make a mistake, you're not worried about the mistake, you're worried about the reaction from your boss. But when you have someone respond to a mistake like, “Hey, it's all good, let's just figure this out,” you settle and you feel good. Caroline: Then you actually can learn from that mistake. Josh: That’s right. Your brain clicks on. When I get scared, I get self-preserving. Horses need stimulus to feel fear, while humans do not. You and I can become scared by thought alone. A horse needs stimulation.  There are two things we need for our horses in these moments. First, is to see where they can soften to and then proceed–but don’t keep forcing them on that thing. When it comes up again, just see what they can do. The second thing is to be the soft answer you would love to have in that same situation for yourself. What would you love to feel in another person with how they held space for you, when you were worried? Now in competitive environments, in these situations, we're not necessarily backing away. We’ve got to stay to task and work our way through it. So I want to build our relationship around that. If we're going to do hard things–how do we do hard things together in a way that allows my horse to feel safer?  "Sometimes as riders, we're bad listeners because we're too motivated by the thing we want." Caroline Culbertson: When you're inviting softness from your horse in those moments, what might that look like? What might that feel like? Is that moving away from your leg? Is that giving to the bit? Josh Nichol: This is where sometimes people struggle in the beginning, but it is more philosophical. If let's say, I connect with my reins, the essence of rebalancing is the half halt, because you're connecting with your hand, you're reengaging your seat, you apply a subtle pressure. There's a pressure inside of that, but as the horse feels that they soften back to the hand and they elongate their top line. There's a rebalancing and a re-softening.  When I connect initially, I'm always trying to listen. Sometimes as riders, we're bad listeners because we're too motivated by the thing we want. What we don't recognize is that if you listen, you will have way more opportunity to get what you want anyway.  As soon as any creature doesn't feel heard, they're immediately defensive. All you have to do is let someone feel heard and they become immediately open. This is the other piece, our horses can only soften to the degree that we're softening.  A lot of times as riders, we want the horse to do the thing, but it's not happening in us. It's not happening in us, but we're pushing on something else to do it. This creates so much mud because it has a hypocritical energy to it. I'm out here spooking at everything that comes up in my life. I'm allowing the world to control me. I'm influenced entirely by the external world and I want my horse not to be. But if that frequency is coming off me all the time and horses can feel it. Horses have drawn me to personal growth because of observing over and over the fact that the horses are primarily resonating off the energy that comes off me. They're not resonating just off the competency of my techniques. Not to underestimate that, that is very valuable, but I feel like we overestimate using techniques to compensate for internal incompetencies.  If I desire my horse to stop spooking, then I need to do a little bit of self reflection on what's happening in me and my world. Am I allowing everything around me to control me? Am I hot because somebody says something that makes me mad, or am I able to maybe breathe through things and allow things to pass and allow myself to feel how I desire? That is the high answer to helping our horses not spook. It's that we do enough work within ourselves that we're not attached to it. Then we can be an example of something new, which is what leads a horse to a change.  Leadership isn't about making a horse do stuff. That's dominance. Leadership is about doing something in yourself enough that others are drawn to it. That's leadership.

**Please note - this blog is written by Equestrian Masterclass instructor Chelsea Canedy and has been reposted here with her permission. The original first appeared on her own website. Photo courtesy, Brooke Hulford** I have been having an amazing time with Luna, my hopeful Mustang Classic mare. I have learned so much from her in these past three months, and we have made incredible strides together. I have pulled from every drawer of my toolbox to start her from scratch and have reached out to friends and fellow trainers along the way when I have had questions.   I thought I was checking all of the right boxes, and the progress Luna and I were making seemed to indicate just that. I felt like I was reading her well every day and that we were making slow but appropriate gains in the right direction. I had been eagerly looking forward to being in Ocala for the winter season, and having more hands-on help with her there. Then, four weeks ago, the old adage, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” literally hit me in the face… I had sat on Luna five times prior. We had walked around my indoor like it was nothing, and had even taken some baby trot steps under saddle with absolutely no problems. It was my last day working with her before heading south in three days, and I opted to sit on her at the end of our session.  For some reason, when I got on, Luna walked away from the block when asked, as usual, but then picked up a little jog on her own. I asked her to slow down like I would a domestic horse, but the combined pressure of someone above her and something pulling back on her was too much for her to reconcile, and she bolted.  Of course, I was in my indoor, as my round pen was outside, frozen solid, so Luna had a wide open runway to pick up steam and buck. About 8 seconds in, I did my best lawn dart impression over her head and into the dirt. My helmet did an excellent job of protecting my noggin but also of coming down on the bridge of my nose and breaking it. I am INCREDIBLY lucky that this was the only damage done, as unpleasant as it was. I have imagined what could have happened so many times.My very first thought when I got up and tried to stop the bleeding from my nose was, “But it was going so well!” I was heartbroken that things had taken this turn and felt like an absolute idiot for letting it happen. At first, I could not understand why it had. I had checked all the right boxes in Luna’s training, hadn’t I? I had done everything right, right?!   In the immediate aftermath of the fall, I was so embarrassed. My face was a mess, and my confidence was shot. Half of my thoughts were telling me that I was clearly not up to the task at hand, and the other half were reminding me that this was my first time ever starting a Mustang, and to try and cut myself a little slack.   Slowly, over the 24 hours after the accident, I began to reach out to people I trust who have experience starting Mustangs. They universally told me that this kind of thing happens to everyone at some point and encouraged me to keep moving forward with help.   I am beyond grateful to have people in the horse world I can turn to in these moments. I am so fortunate that my personal learning journey has connected me with amazing trainers in the worlds of eventing, dressage, reining, mustang and colt starting, positive reinforcement, and liberty work.  And even though I know it is literally impossible for any one person to hold all of the knowledge that these individuals carry, sometimes I have a hard time admitting that there are things I can’t figure out myself if I just try hard enough, so reaching out when things go wrong isn’t always easy for me. I recently read a post by Amy Skinner, in which she writes, “As I tell my students often, I am critiquing the technique - not YOU as a person. So listen well, but don’t smear it all over your heart because if you fail, it’s a moment in time, not who you are as a person.”   This is something I have to remind myself of over and over again. Making a mistake or not knowing something doesn’t make me “bad,” and there is no endpoint to the accumulation of knowledge that makes anyone “good.”  It’s all just learning, not a determination of self-worth. My good friend Tik Maynard is preparing for Road to the Horse, a colt-starting competition at the end of March, and my winter farm is just down the road from his and his wife Sinead’s Copperline Farm, so I am getting some hands-on help from Tik while I’m in Florida. Luna is at the right stage in her understanding to be great practice for Tik as he prepares for this event, while I also benefit immensely from his help with the next steps of her training.   Here, I get to follow more of Amy’s advice when she says, “The sooner you can develop the ability to differentiate criticism about something you are doing from your self-value, the sooner you can learn and learn well.”  While no one has blatantly criticized me for the work I have done with Luna, there has been more than enough self-criticism along the way.  So now, every day that I watch Tik work with Luna, I have the opportunity to recognize those critical voices for what they are: immaterial roadblocks to my own development. I get to consciously practice allowing them to dissolve back into the space they arose from and float away on the Florida breeze while I refocus on the daily journey of learning. Special thanks to co-sponsors Alison Brigham and Michael Frankel, as well as the barn staff at Unexpected Farm who help make this journey possible.

Jumping used to be the only thing I ever wanted to do. Before I even had a concept of what “training” or “foundation” meant, I knew one thing: those girls I saw jumping over massive obstacles, across the country? I wanted to be them. So perhaps it was somewhat fortuitous that my mother expressly forbade me to even think about leaving the ground on horseback. Knowing that I simply wanted to learn how to ride, I began instead learning about this craft called “dressage”. Here was a way for me to ride, while still following the (silly) rule my mom had laid down. My next step was to call the barn down the street, a high-end hunter/jumper barn that also employed dressage trainers. My cheeks still color red when thinking about that first conversation.   “Hi, I’d like to learn more about taking dress-age lessons,” my mispronunciation of the word likely placing me firmly into the eye roll category to the person on the other end of the line.  But they obliged me, and thus my education began. For the first two years of my riding life, I followed the rules. All four feet on the ground. I worried I’d be bored – but I wasn’t. Now, I look back on those formative years with gratitude. It’s not that I felt I wouldn’t have gained the same foundational education had I started out right away with the jumper trainer in residence (but, I also feel that this education is missing from many such programs), but by dedicating myself solely to dressage at the outset, I learned more about what it meant to connect with a horse and how to use my body and my mind to influence her way of going.  When I use the words “flatwork” or “dressage”, they carry much of the same meaning, though I understand most people use them as separate concepts in many ways. And while not every rider who jumps will want or need to learn how to, say, do a lovely half-pass with a perfect amount of flexion, it’s really the fundamental elements of flatwork and dressage that apply to all of us. I watch riders like Josh Nichol or Tik Maynard incorporate flatwork into the work they do with their horses. I watch eventers like Boyd Martin and Allison Springer focus more on footwork and flatwork than they do  jumping massive fences every day. I watch Olympic jumping riders like Peter Wylde ride on the flat as an integral part of each and every ride.  Surely, these riders are doing something right. And I think it starts on the flat. This month, NÖELLE FLOYD and Equestrian Masterclass are focusing on flatwork as a fundamental foundation (yes, I love alliteration, if you couldn’t tell).  We created new training content with Equestrian Masterclass coach Peter Wylde (if you haven’t checked out his Masterclass on Quiet Riding, you can do that here) which features several guided rides and video demonstrations about flatwork for jumping (or not!). We also recruited 5* three-day eventing rider Allison Springer to help us with a new Guided Ride Mini-Pack breaking down some fundamental flatwork tools for you.  Allison's program just launched yesterday, with Peter's coming very shortly, so make sure to check them both out! Looking for some more flatwork practice in the meantime? Here are a few of my favorite flatwork-focused training materials currently available in Equestrian Masterclass: Masterclass Courses: Laura Graves: Troubleshooting Common Flatwork Woes Mette Larsen: Dressage for All Disciplines Karl Cook: Creating an Adjustable and Rideable Horse Guided Rides: Amy Skinner: Developing Leg Yield and Responsiveness in Walk and Trot Andrew Welles: Go-To, Effective Flatwork for Rideability Chelsea Canedy: Following Workout for Supple Seat and Hand