How Good Riders Get Good

A revised edition of the bestseller. “A tough love approach to helping you become the best rider you can be, by guiding you to make the right choices.” —The Horsemen’s Yankee Pedlar

Denny Emerson, named “One of the 50 Most Influential Horsemen of the 20th Century” by The Chronicle of the Horse, boils good riding down into good choices, including:

• Examine how your choice of riding sport may or may not be the best for who you are and where you live.
• Find out how those frustrating hurdles known as “life circumstances” don’t necessarily hold you back like you think they do.
• Learn how to build a strong support team by winning people to your cause and choosing the right teachers and mentors.
• Analyze your physical self (your body, how it is formed and how you care for it) and your intellectual self (your “horse smarts” and how you are adding to them or not) and apply the results to your “gonna-be-good” equation.
• Take a good hard look at your partner—your horse—and think critically about his ability to help you attain your riding goals.
• Discover the nine key character traits of successful riders and how you can learn to call each one of them your own.

Along the way you’ll read the stories of twenty-three of the world’s top riders from different disciplines and sports—including dressage, reining, driving, show jumping, endurance, hunter/jumper, and eventing—and how they “got good” despite the same kinds of challenges and setbacks you face in your own day-to-day riding. You’ll get an inside look at their path to success, as well as their very best tips for how to “make it” in the horse industry.