Why rider reflection is key to learning and progress

Written by:

Equestic

Published on:

September 2, 2026

What happens after a ride matters too. Taking a few minutes to think about what worked, what didn’t and what you want to remember can change what you bring into your next ride. For Lendon Gray, journaling and reflection have been part of her own approach to riding and coaching for decades.

Lendon Gray

“I think journaling as a rider is absolutely essential because we have such busy days now and we run from one thing to another. By just stopping a minute, writing things down, making a note, so that you remember. We finish our lesson, we jump off, we do something else. This makes you stop just a minute, 30 seconds, and make some notes that you really want to remember before you do your next ride.”

“I started doing journaling, I would say, back in about 1978 when I started to ride seriously and really realized that this dressage journey was something I was going to be serious about. I was riding quite a few horses, and so I had a little notebook that I would write notes in at the end of the day.

When I went and took lessons, I actually had a little handheld tape recorder that, as I drove home from my lessons, I would speak into. And then that night, I was pretty serious about transcribing from my tape recorder to a piece of paper. It’s been part of my training of myself from when I first became really serious about dressage.”

“The rider reflecting on their lessons is a skill they have to develop, I think. It’s not just going from a lesson to something else or another horse. Let’s face it. Riding is very physical, but even more so, it’s very mental.

The ones who are thinking and analyzing and coming after the lesson, coming back to it: What if I had done this? Why didn’t I do that? I’ve got to remember to ask about this.

The rider taking their time to make their own thoughts about the lessons, not just my thoughts, but their own thoughts about the lesson, is incredibly valuable. They’re the ones that are really going to progress and become our real trainers.

After every ride, a rider should be thinking about, Why did that go well? That was better than it’s ever been before. I wonder why it worked? Or often the opposite, That was a disaster. I wonder why that went wrong?”

“Making little reflections after every ride particularly gives you a sense of the progress. It’s getting better. Maybe it wasn’t so good today, but it’s getting better overall.

If you’re not making those little reflections after every ride, you’re not likely to see the progress up or the progress down. And I think that’s incredibly important.

If I can read the rider’s reflections before I give them a lesson, that’s a huge plus for me. Very often, even if I ask, they don’t put it into words very well. I can see the progress or lack of progress over a few days since I saw them a week ago or whatever. So that’s going to give me so much more information that I can make the lesson hopefully much more useful to them.

From my experience, they do not think about their riding enough. They do not reflect enough. They do not think about what their lesson was actually about.

If they would just stop and take a few minutes every day, make some notes right after you ride. Take a quick look at your notes before you get on your horse so that you’re making good use of every step that you take.

I think this reflection part of the Coach-Copilot can be a real game changer if people take it seriously and use it. It’s going to help them. It’s going to help them remember. It’s going to help them see a direction in their riding.

I look forward to it as a coach, as an instructor, to be able to see what’s going on, not only with their horse and their training, but what’s going on in their heads. That’s often the hardest part to analyze. What is the rider thinking?

I think the ‘thinking rider,’ the one that’s reflecting and particularly doing it in a way that they remember, it gives them a confidence. It gives them a sense of where they’re going. And of course, that’s going to become something that the horse is going to realize, feel.

This is a rider that’s got a direction and helping me along, as opposed to just jumping from one thing to another with no plan to it and no system to it.”

Rider Reflection

Equestic Rider Reflections, a new audio recording feature, is designed to help equestrians capture their thoughts, questions and insights after every solo training.

Since the launch of EQ Coach-Copilot just a few months ago, thousands of coaches and riders are already using the app to capture their lessons. The audio is recorded and automatically summarized, so both coaches and riders can revisit each session for better learning. Note-taking done for you.

With the new Rider Reflections feature, that learning journey now continues between lessons, giving riders a simple way to record their own insights from independent training sessions.