15/09/2026
When Technical Expertise Becomes a Blind Spot🫥
I have been thinking about a curious problem in equestrian sport.
We have become extraordinarily good at describing what horses should be doing. The poll should be up. The hind leg should engage. The tempo should remain consistent. The horse should bend correctly, maintain the contact, stay balanced and remain on the aids.
All useful things to understand.
Unfortunately, there is an entire horse attached to the poll.😎
Sometimes our technical expertise becomes so dominant that we stop asking what is happening to that horse while we are busily producing the technically correct answer.
This is "technical tunnel vision".🧐
Of course we need to ride well. We need good balance, an independent seat and the ability to be a good load for the horse to carry. Technical skill matters enormously.
But you can possess a beautiful seat and tremendous technical skill and still damage the horse underneath you if you don't understand and respect the layers of the animal carrying you.
Because the horse is experiencing you too.
It is experiencing your body, your aids and your expectations, while simultaneously experiencing its own body and the environment you have placed it in.
Horses arrive with asymmetries, learning histories, physical limitations, fatigue, attention, arousal and their own perception of what is happening around them. A horse can also perform a technically recognisable movement without performing it functionally well. It can compensate, brace or continue trying after fatigue has changed how its body is coping.
Yet technical tunnel vision offers wonderfully straightforward solutions.
The poll dropped? Put it back up.😵💫
The horse lost bend? More bend.😵💫
The horse is rushing? Control the tempo.😵💫
The horse became tense? Ride it more correctly.😵💫
And thus we arrive at one of equestrianism's more impressive achievements: trying harder at the very thing that may be making the situation worse.😕
Good horsemanship requires something beyond technical correctness. It requires decision-making.
You have to notice when the horse changes and ask why. Sometimes you continue. Sometimes you reorganise. Sometimes you change the exercise, reduce the demand, allow the horse to stretch or recognise fatigue. Sometimes the problem you thought required more training requires a completely different question.
Without that flexibility, technical knowledge can become surprisingly coercive, even in very capable hands.😎
If I believe the technically correct response should occur when I apply the technically correct aid, failure to produce it can easily become justification for applying more.
More leg. More rein. More insistence.
After all, the training manual isn't tired.🙄
But the horse might be!⚠️
This isn't an argument for less technical expertise.
But technical expertise needs to sit alongside an understanding of how horses learn, how they experience their environment, how tension changes movement, how fatigue changes capacity and how an individual horse is coping with what we are asking of it.
The real skill is knowing when the technically correct thing is also the right thing for the horse in front of you at that moment. Sometimes it will be. Sometimes good horsemanship means changing the plan.
After all, the horse hasn't read the training manual. We have.
That rather puts the responsibility back where it belongs.❤
Collectable Advice 293/365. Please SHARE. Technical brilliance doesn't impress me much when the horse has disappeared from the equation. Equestrian sport could do with a little less technical tunnel vision and a lot more curiosity about the horse underneath it.❤
IMAGE 📸: This was one of the first images that popped up when I searched “dressage rider” in Shutterstock. Interesting, I’ll leave that one with you.🤔
P.S. This is exactly why I’m excited about Project Reboot. Technical skill is only one layer. We’re going right back to discover everything else that matters to the horse underneath it.