We Don't Know What We Don't Know - Instructor Half Halt

I don’t know about you, but I am frequently researching diagnoses on my riders. I get emails from professional organizations tied to specific conditions. I follow what PATH offers and I read carefully what diagnosis specific organizations share. I’ve been doing this for years, and I still catch myself thinking I should know more about how to support my riders. What am I missing?

If that sounds familiar, I don’t think it’s because you’re behind. I think it’s unfortunately because of how our field actually works. There is SO much to learn – and to continues to change and its our job to be informed.

If you went through PATH or a similar adaptive/therapeutic organization they typically give us a line or two on the common diagnoses, but that is intended to be a starting point, not a full picture. So we then turn to Google, and suddenly we’re wading through millions of results, half of them written for a completely different audience, some of them outdated, some of them contradicting each other. Then, somewhere in the middle of all that noise is the information we actually need for our riders, but finding it takes time and often leads to even more questions, especially how to apply what we’ve learned.

So we do what instructors have always done. We piece it together. A conversation with another instructor who worked with a similar diagnosis. A detail a parent mentioned in passing. Something we read once and half remember. A fact we picked up at a conference three years ago that we’re pretty sure is still accurate. Over time, this becomes our knowledge base. Not an organized structure and not something we can easily reference. Just years of scraps, sewn together as best we can.

I’ve built my own understanding this way for a long time, and it mostly works. But mostly it isn’t the same as fully. When I’m honest with myself, I know there are gaps. Riders I’ve taught where I did the best I could with the information I had, but where I still wonder if there was something I missed. A safety consideration I didn’t know to ask about. An equipment adjustment or horse matching that could have made a real difference. A better way to structure the lesson based on how that rider’s condition actually affects their body or their processing.

This isn’t about guilt, and I don’t think it should be for you either. It’s about recognizing that our field doesn’t hand us a complete education. We’re expected to build our own understanding, condition by condition, rider by rider, for the entire length of our careers. That’s a lot to carry, especially when the stakes involve someone’s safety and wellbeing.

But there is a course that fills this gap, and I really enjoyed it and wanted to share. I took the course “Incase You’re Not A Doctor” by Esther Nofziger. Esther is a Occupational Therapist Bsc., Hippotherapy Clinical Specialist (AHA), Therapeutic Riding Senior Instructor (CanTRA), and Instructor of Beginners in English Riding (Equine Canada) and International Clinician and Consultant regarding Adaptive Riding, traditional OT topics. Not only has Esther been so wonderful to get to know, but she is a wealth of information and has put so much time into creating such an amazing resource.

One of the biggest things I valued in her course was that it wasn’t written for doctors, therapists, or educators. It was put together specifically for instructors like us who are in the arena every week. It takes the kind of information most of us have been collecting in fragments for years and organizes it into something clear and usable.

It offers in-depth instruction, detailed reference materials you can keep, and a certificate of completion to support your continuing education. The course starts with the body itself, the anatomy and mechanics of how the body actually works, then moves through orthopedic conditions, neurological and neuromuscular conditions, neurodevelopmental conditions, and genetic conditions. Each one is broken down into what the condition is, how it impacts the body or the mind, and what that means for how you plan and adapt your lessons.

While I wish I had this course early in my career, I want to be clear that this isn’t just for instructors who are new to the field. If you’ve been teaching for twenty years, you likely still have gaps, the same way I did. That’s not a mark against your experience. It’s simply what happens when the information available to us comes from scattered emails, quick conversations, and search results instead of one resource that was actually built for this work.

It would be amazing to have a medical degree to support our riders. But that’s just not realistic for most of us, and it was never meant to be our job. What we do need is the right information, organized in a way we can actually use in our lessons. That’s what this course is.

To stop guessing and start moving forward with more confidence, I recommend that you consider taking “Incase You’re Not A Doctor”.

PS: Esther kindly offered a 20% off discount for the Instructor Half Halt community. I don’t receive anything if you take the course; I simply found it useful and I love that Esther generously shared this with all of us!

Link to her website: Aufsteiger Website – where you find the “Incase your not a doctor” course and more!
Discount code: HALFHALT20