A few months ago I was contacted about trying a fantastic app what gives you a riding instructor in your pocket. Rider Guider is an app full of schooling exercises for horses of different levels to help you keep your schooling sessions structured and interesting. I’ve loved using it!
4 main exercise categories
There are 4 different categories of exercises on Rider Guider. They allow you to search exercises specific to an area you want to focus on. Across the 4 categories there are over 60 exercises. Plus there are always new exercises being added.
Warm Up
Exercises for both you and your horse to help you prepare for your ride. There are some great exercises for every day warm ups, warm ups for jumping or shows and even some hypnosis to help you enjoy your ride!
Ground Work
These exercises are a mixture of useful lunging exercises to teaching some basic manners such as staying out your personal space or standing at a mounting block.
Flat Work
I would group these as exercises to improve your horses general strength and way of going. They focus on some fundamentals that any horse will benefit from improving. Such as straightlines, correct bend and polework.
Dressage
Finally, the dressage exercises focus on more specific dressage movements. These include everything from trotting 20m circles to walk pirouettes.
Great playlist option
You have the option to add exercises to your own playlist, so you have them all in one place. Once you play the first one in a playlist, it will automatically play the whole playlist one after another. So you can create your own schooling session of exercises. You can skip exercises, start the playlist halfway through. It’s just really easy to use. You can download the playlist so you can listen to it without using mobile data, which is great if your yard doesn’t have the best signal!
One slightly annoying thing is that you can’t seem to rearrange the playlist, you have add the exercises to the playlist in the order you want to listen to them, what is a little bit annoying. But really not the end of the world.
How we have got on with Rider Guider
If you follow us on Instagram, you will have seen that how much I have been enjoying using Rider Guider. I often struggle with what to do in our schooling sessions, especially since Scottie’s loss of use. We have had a bad few years. I slowly pick him up & bring him back into work and at somepoint down the line, life has got in the way and he has had more time off. Now is a great example of this, we were back trotting and hacking. But now he is having time off due to his weird allergic reaction in his armpit. Over a week later he has sore, scabby skin over his girth area.
But Rider Guider has allowed me to structure our rides, giving us a focus without feeling like I am going to fast with him. There are plenty of exercises to ride in walk, without putting too much strain on any of his weaknesses. There’s a great warm up what starts with riding 20m circles on both reins in walk. This is something I’ve never really used as a warm up before but I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s not hard work, but it sets us up nicely for a productive ride rather than just walking large for the same amount of time.
My favourite exercises for us have revolved around focusing on our positioning and accuracy. I can spend a 40min ride just in walk riding through these exercises. My favourites are about straightlines and changes in bend such as; the hourglass, the serpentine and the bowtie. I love that as you ride through the exercises, you aren’t just reminded of the shape and the markers, but how your horse should feel, how you should be sitting, what your aids should be. I find that really helpful as I can definitely focus too much on Scottie and forget about what I am doing.
Scottie also seems to be enjoying it. He is lazy in the school and typically does the bare minimum. But since using Rider Guider he is much more up for it. He is more forward and responsive. I feel like I ask less of him. I don’t worry as much about where his head is and instead focus on how he is moving and what bend we get. This naturally makes him use himself properly and carry his head correctly. At the end of the session, and throughout the session, he enjoys having the opportunity to stretch down and walk out for a bit.
If I could improve one thing about the audio clips, I think it would be great to choose the speed at which they play. For example 1x vs 1.5x vs 2x speed. At the start of the clip it does say that if you get ahead of the audio, just circle to get back. But this isn’t always possible in certain exercises. I don’t want to put a circle in the middle of my serpentine. Whether it’s because Scottie is a big horse and we are only in a 20 x 40 arena, but the audio does move a bit too slow for us and we certainly aren’t rushing through the exercises.
But I do love this app. I have found it so helpful. It’s available on Android & IOS. It’s free to download I think there are a small number of exercises available without subscription. But there is a free 14 day trial of the subscription, so you get plenty of time to try it all out. The full subcription is only £4.99 a month, less if you subscribe quarterly or annually. So I really think it is a bargan if it’s something you will use once or twice a week!
Last Updated on 09/06/2023
