A Look Inside My Training with Nevada – Airtime & Flow
As you know, there are so many different phases we move through, train through and grow through together with our horses. Each of these processes has its own beauty and brings insights you would never have gained without truly experiencing them — with all the highs and lows.
They don’t just help you grow as a trainer, but as a person too.
That’s why I’d love to regularly take you along on a little part of my journey with Nevada: our development, insights, thoughts and the creative processes we explore together.
As we move into deeper and more refined stages of training, everything begins to take more shape in the movement and posture of the horse. Certain postures can give a horse a sense of safety or balance, and over time, preferences can develop from this.
For Nevada, for example, one of those preferences is to tighten his topline slightly when I ask for more collection. So for years, I’ve been exploring this together with him — learning to feel more, understand more and fine-tune our communication, so that he can truly move through his whole body.
By “through the body,” I mean that everything works together, creating less tension and restriction. When that happens, the entire feeling changes for me as a rider. Everything feels soft through the joints, yet at the same time incredibly connected.
Some feelings are almost impossible to put into words. As my trainer recently said: some things you can only truly understand once you have felt them.
Something else I’m experiencing more and more strongly is just how powerful words, thoughts and affirmations can be. If, for example, I consciously focus all my senses and understanding on a particular area of Nevada’s body for an entire week, I notice that something begins to change there. In him, but also in me. Sometimes that transformation is tiny, and sometimes it suddenly feels huge.
While we are working, I also try to transfer the thoughts and images I have in my mind to Nevada, allowing him to search, explore and try.
And precisely because some things are so difficult to find, the difference feels enormous when suddenly, even just for a moment, it’s there. That motivates me tremendously.
The feeling Nevada can give me in walk, for example, when all his muscles consciously work together and he makes himself proud and tall from within, is something I can almost only describe as riding through water. Horses naturally tend to make themselves light, powerful and tall in water.
That feeling.
Airtime & Flow
Right now, Nevada and I are in an incredibly beautiful, but also challenging phase of our journey. Two words keep coming back in our training: airtime & flow.
To me, flow means allowing the movement to continue travelling through the body. Airtime is that moment when more power, lift, collection and expression appear.
Nevada can do both. But bringing those two qualities together is exactly where our challenge lies.
When I ask for more collection or airtime, for example towards passage or piaffe, Nevada naturally tends to lean back a little. He can lift his legs beautifully, but that doesn’t automatically mean his body is moving as one connected whole.
What I’m looking for is the moment when his chest and withers lift, his trunk and core engage, and that connection continues all the way through to his hind legs. When that happens, I can feel that he is using his entire body and everything becomes connected.
Everything comes together, and it feels as though you could move into that feeling — and back out of it — at any moment.
And then comes perhaps the most difficult part: can we maintain that quality of engagement while moving forward again, without losing the feeling we just found?
It may sound like a small detail, but lately it has opened up an entirely new world for me.
When everything suddenly comes together
I’m beginning to feel more and more clearly that there is a difference between simply being loose and truly moving with release and connection through the right kind of engagement.
Just as there is a difference between taking on a posture and a posture that genuinely arises from the entire body — and from the horse’s mind.
Sometimes, with Nevada, I suddenly feel his withers change underneath me. His neck stays connected towards me, his chest moves forward and his entire body seems to become spring-loaded.
And I think: Yes, there he is!
Sometimes it only lasts for a few strides.
My first instinct used to be: stop, reward, well done!
But now, together, we are learning to stay inside that good feeling for a little longer. Instead of immediately coming out of it, I want to help him discover that this way of moving can itself continue to feel good. That we can stay there, breathe there and eventually move forward from there.
What I find so fascinating is that Nevada is also teaching me more and more about the relationship between tension, engagement and relaxation.
We often think of relaxation as being as loose as possible. But I’m increasingly experiencing that the right kind of engagement can actually create another form of relaxation.
Just like when you consciously stand tall, strong and beautifully upright yourself: your body is working, but you’re not holding or bracing yourself.
And perhaps that is exactly where so much of my own development lies at the moment — both as an athlete, as I currently do EMS training two to three times a week, and as a trainer.
Staying curious about what emerges
My focus is shifting more and more towards the process that unfolds during each individual training session. Of course we have dreams and goals, but there is so much value for me in everything we discover along the way.
What is happening in his body today? Where do we lose each other for a moment? Where do we find each other again? And what can that one tiny moment teach me?
Precisely because airtime and flow together are not naturally Nevada’s biggest sweet spot, he challenges me to keep thinking creatively. To alternate between different postures, feel again, try something different and sometimes take a step back before building forward again from there.
That doesn’t always make it easy, but it makes it incredibly valuable.
Because the things that don’t come naturally are often the things that teach me the most.
And everything I truly experience along the way — the highs and lows, the searching, the experimenting and eventually those moments when everything suddenly comes together — becomes something I can take with me and pass on to my students and to other horses.
