EquiMotion, Stafford (2026)

12/06/2026

Who can relate to this??! 😂😂

We may joke about horse riders being a "tough breed" and keeping going through injury etc ....but have you ever wondered how much this impacts your horse, do you even think it does??

Comment below with your experiences ....👇👇👇

01/06/2026

I've had a few people ask recently what HorseFirst Biomechanics™ actually is.

It's not something I woke up one morning and decided to create, but looking back, I think I've accidentally been building it for most of my riding life.

I learned to ride on horses that hated being held together - the sort that could feel you move a millimetre, the sort that taught you very quickly that pulling harder wasn't the answer 😅

Then came endurance horses.
Arab racehorses.
Rehab horses.
Therapy work.
More rehab horses.
A few horses that probably needed a therapist more than a trainer!
And somewhere in amongst all that... my own collection of injuries.

The funny thing is that whether I was treating horses, training horses, rehabbing horses or trying to rebuild myself, I kept coming back to the same question:

Why is this horse responding like that? Not what's wrong with it, or how do I stop it. But why?

The answer was very rarely just the horse ....

Sometimes it was pain, sometimes confidence and sometimes understanding. But very often there was a rider in the middle of it all influencing the conversation without even realising. Be it through balance, breathing, timing, tension, fear, compensation etc.

That's really where HorseFirst Biomechanics™ came from.

So what is it?

At its simplest, it's understanding how the rider's body influences the horse, and how the horse responds in return .... and the conversations happening between horse and rider that neither may realise they're having.

Over the coming months I'll be sharing more of the ideas, observations and practical tools that sit behind HorseFirst Biomechanics™ as it continues to evolve. 😊

29/05/2026

A few more dates have escaped Jack's filming schedule and become available... 👀🐴

Ever wondered:

✨ why your horse always seems to drift one way?
✨ why your left rein has a personality of its own?
✨ why you can sit beautifully in walk but canter feels like organised chaos?
✨ why downward transitions seem to throw you forwards?
✨ why one seat bone feels obvious and the other appears to have left the building?
✨ why your horse feels different depending on which rein you're on?
✨ why your instructor keeps mentioning your right shoulder and you're convinced it's innocent?

Sometimes it's incredibly difficult to feel what's really happening when you're trying to ride, steer, balance, remember your lesson and manage a horse all at the same time.

That's where Jack our fabulous mechanical horse is proving so useful.

Without needing to worry about the horse underneath you, we can explore balance, movement, timing, asymmetry and those sneaky little habits that have often been following us around for years.

Then the really interesting bit happens...

You step onto your own horse and suddenly things make a lot more sense.

As part of the HorseFirst Biomechanics™ filming and development work, a few individual sessions have become available:

📅 10th June
🕙 10am
🕚 11am

📅 11th June
🕙 10am
🕚 11am

📅 15th June
🕙 10am
🕚 11am
🕐 1pm
🕑 2pm

Sessions last 50 minutes, £55 per session based in Stafford ST189FB

Fair warning though...

Jack has become surprisingly good at exposing things we'd all rather pretend aren't happening 😅

Drop me a message if you'd like one of the spaces, or, if these dates don't work msg me with your preferences and we will try and work around you.

28/05/2026

I’ve been quietly building something within EquiMotion recently called HorseFirst Biomechanics™.

It’s probably the closest thing I’ve ever found to putting words around the way I’ve always instinctively ridden and worked with horses. Not biomechanics in the traditional “heels down and shoulders back” sense 😅

But think more:
How does the rider’s body affect the horse?
How does the horse’s nervous system respond to the rider?
What happens when tension, fear, pain, bracing or old habits quietly become part of the conversation?

Because horses don’t just feel our aids.

They feel:
✨ our balance
✨ our breathing
✨ our timing
✨ our tension
✨ and sometimes the things we’re trying hardest not to feel ourselves.

The more I rebuild myself as a rider, the more I realise biomechanics isn’t just about movement.

It’s about communication, the horse responding to the rider, the rider reacting to the horse and the 2 nervous systems constantly influencing each other, whether we realise it or not.

And honestly, some of the biggest breakthroughs I’ve seen recently haven’t come from “better riding”… they’ve come from riders finally feeling safe enough in their own body to soften, breathe and actually feel their horse again.

This is also exactly what Jack has quietly been helping me film and build behind the scenes over the last few months… and I'm pretty sure HorseFirst Biomechanics™ is going to shape a lot of where EquiMotion heads next.

26/05/2026

Quite aptly for where I’m currently at myself, the topic for May in the TRTmethod TRT Advanced Trainer Program is rider fear, one of the biggest things it talks about is how fear often starts LONG before we’d ever describe ourselves as “scared.”

It sneaks up quietly .....

✅Holding your breath approaching a corner.
✅Tightening your jaw before you even mount.
✅Scanning for what could go wrong instead of riding what’s actually underneath you.
✅Bracing in your seat even when your horse is calm.
✅Doing groundwork again… because getting on suddenly feels like a lot.

Yep, they are little all little tricks that my brain has thrown at me recently!

I think many experienced riders don’t necessarily lose skill…instead, they lose the feeling of safety in their own body.

The really interesting thing is that the course talks about fear not as weakness or lack of confidence… but as a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do after difficult experiences - protect.

I think horse riders have spent years thinking of themselves “weak” for things that were probably biology all along.

It’s also something I’m becoming increasingly passionate about integrating into my own work moving forwards, particularly around helping riders better understand nervous systems, body awareness and rebuilding trust in themselves again.

Over the coming months I’ll be developing some exciting new rider-focused sessions and courses around exactly this topic, in a much more horsewoman-friendly, practical and real-life way 😅

22/05/2026

I think part of the reason I’ve struggled so much with my riding confidence recently years is because my entire riding identity was built around horses that made you feel ALIVE 😅

"Spike" was (and still is) exactly that horse.

A little grey Arab with a pink nose, a huge jump and very strong opinions about life. He’d really only been shown before I bought him and genuinely saw “going forwards” as more of a suggestion than a requirement 😂

After many, many lessons, many questionable ideas and both of us regularly testing my instructor’s patience, he finally looked at me one day and said:

“Take him hunting.”

At this point:
✨ I had never hunted before
✨ Spike had definitely never hunted before
✨ neither of us had any idea what we were doing

But somewhere between the mud, galloping and chaos, that horse suddenly came alive. And honestly… so did I.

I think that’s the difficult thing about changing as a rider. When your body no longer feels safe doing the very thing that once made you feel most like yourself.

I suspect most riders have “that horse” somewhere in their history… the one that slightly changed their brain chemistry forever, comment and share your story as a rider.

20/05/2026

I don’t think I ever really learned to ride “easy” horses 😅 The horses I’ve always been drawn to are the ones that make you THINK.

The sharp ones, the sensitive ones, the horses that notice everything, the ones that hate being held together ...... the ones that can feel a fly land on them at 200 metres.

The kind where if your balance changes by half a millimetre they’ve already moved up through the gears, and honestly, I loved that.

I loved that they made me ride from feel instead of force, I loved that they demanded timing, softness and awareness, and I loved that when you got it right, they felt like absolute magic.

But I think the difficult thing about injury is that eventually your nervous system stops experiencing those horses as exciting… and starts experiencing them as expensive ways to test your reflexes 😅

That’s been quite a hard thing for me to come to terms with recently, I will get back to that place ..... but for now a fair bit is changing.

Has anyone else experienced this and changed the "type" of horse you ride?? Please tell me I’m not the only rider with an extremely specific and slightly questionable horse type 😂

19/05/2026

Horse girls will literally have a nervous system held together with tape, determination and the occasional ibuprofen…

…and still convince themselves that what they really need is another highly sensitive pink-nosed project horse with the emotional stability of a caffeinated squirrel 😅

In hindsight, continuing to buy sharp traumatised Iberians and Arabs while carrying enough old injuries to make mounting feel like an extreme sport may not actually have been the calm, nervous-system-friendly recovery plan I thought it was.

Who knew 😂

17/05/2026

The older I get, the more I realise horses tell us far more about nervous systems than we ever give them credit for, especially the sensitive ones.

For years I described horses as: “Sharp, hot, spooky, reactive, naughty, dramatic, over-sensitive etc”…

Now I catch myself wondering, “What actually happened to make you feel like you need to protect yourself like that?” Because horses with big reactions are very rarely enjoying themselves, and honestly… neither are riders.

One particular horse of mine changed this massively for me. He arrived looking beautiful on the outside… but underneath was carrying so much tension, hypervigilance and stored fear that it completely changed the way I started looking at behaviour. He made me realise that horses aren’t “difficult”… they just don’t feel safe yet.

I think one of the biggest things horses have taught me over the last few years is that tension doesn’t always look dramatic.

Sometimes it looks like holding breath, bracing, over-reacting, shutting down, spooking, freezing, rushing, or trying to control absolutely everything around you.
In horses, and for humans too.

I used to think confidence was about becoming tougher.

Now I think maybe real confidence is when neither nervous system feels like it has to fight so hard anymore. 🤔

16/05/2026

As part of my recent musings I’m starting to realise there’s a very specific type of horse I’ve chosen for most of my life…

👍Grey.
👍Sharp.
👍Probably Arabian or Iberian
👍Highly intelligent.
👍Slightly emotionally complicated.
👍Usually with a pink nose, and a possible joint issue somewhere
👍And ideally capable of reading my thoughts before I’ve fully formed them myself

For years I thought I just liked sensitive horses, but I think it’s deeper than that - I think I liked horses that made me feel capable, horses that needed feel, timing, balance and quick reactions. Horses that made me feel like that rider.

And the strange thing about injury is… your identity often carries on long after your nervous system has changed.

So while my body was becoming more cautious, more unstable and more aware of consequence… I carried on buying horses that required the reactions of a fighter pilot and the emotional regulation of a small woodland monk 😂

Partly because I loved them, partly because they’re genuinely incredible horses, but if I’m really honest…partly because I think I was trying to prove to myself that I was still the rider I used to be.

I’m not even sure now that confidence is about bravery.

I think maybe confidence is what happens when your body finally feels safe enough to stop protecting you all the time.

EquiMotion

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