Boyd Martin Eventing Program "Creating Your 2026 Blueprint"

 I recently attended the live webinar that Performance Riders was hosting with Boyd Martin, Peter Wylde, Brett Parbery, and Lillian Wood. It was so helpful because what they were all talking about was exactly what I have trying to figure out in my head for the past month.

I took a lot of notes, but they were talking a lot faster than I could write my notes down so I'm sure that I missed a lot but here's what I took that I think would benefit to try and apply it with Sindri...

Starting with Boyd -- 

- There are two types of goal setting, goals for your horse and goals for you as a rider. The horses goals are adjustable but the rider goals are pretty much set. You need to be honest with yourself and find where you lack training in parts of your riding, for example he said he has always struggled with flying lead changes and that's something he is striving to fix.

- Each training ride has to count. If you want to get better as a rider and get your horse to be better you can't just ride around aimlessly without really working on anything, you have to set your goal for the ride even if it's a small goal, eg. I'm going to get around one small jump course finding all my distances. You will never find improvement if you never focus and work for it.

- One of the things he does for his horse Luke, I thought would be very helpful with Sindri being a baby tb who loves to zoom around jump courses, was that he jumps half a course and then trots for a minute to reset his brain, and then he picks up canter and finishes the rest of the course. This won't work for every horse but I think some sort of version of this would be helpful for me and Sindri.

Boyd and Bruno at Kentucky 2024

Peter Wylde had me looking at my riding very honestly, he drills rideability making sure your horse is polite to ride through a whole course. He told us to think about the amount of rideability each of us has in our jump courses and rate it one through ten. My answer was -2. At the moment me and Sindri have basically no ridablittly in our courses (could be a mix of still getting to know him or just that I've never really thought about it because Cyrus and Brooks were easy to jump around courses once we got to a certain point)

Another thing Peter said was being able to lengthen and shorten your stride without having to fight your horse about it. I plan to work on that a lot setting up a line of two poles about 4 strides apart and being able to add strides into the line and take some out without fighting him for it.

He also was talking about the horses are happier when things are consistent so trying to figure out a "recipe" for your horse is helpful so that you know "okay my horse needs a 15 minute warm-up before stadium with a 5 minute walk break right before we go in for our round because that's what makes him happiest" so then you can plan for that and have the best results.

Peter Wylde

There was so much more that they had talked about, but those were the biggest things I'm going to start putting into my riding and training with Sindri.

I definitely already have a competition plan for next year with Sindri and as I start working with him and finding areas he needs improvement in, our training plan will start to come together. What I do know is what I need for me as a rider, I need to work on my leg and core strength, not relying on my reins for everything, and using my leg/seat/hands in the proper timing so that I can catch him before things happen so that he doesn't drop his shoulder or rush to the fences, I can fix it before it happens, and that's just the beginning of what I need to work on for me.

I'm going to share these things with my trainer so that she can also help me because a lot of times i'm looking back at my videos after my lease rides thinking I should have done that again or i should have fixed my position, and I want to be able to have her opinion on what I think would be good for Sindri because she might have other ideas that would be better for him - same with his owner.