07/09/2026
Did you know that SafeSport considers withholding water from a child athlete “physical misconduct”? 😯 That applies to riding lesson students, too!
It seems like every summer, there are a few more hot takes (pun not intended, haha) about how students want to interrupt their riding lesson every three minutes for water, and how maybe it’s just a little out of control because when WE learned to ride, back in the good old days, nobody was letting us stop for a drink, and we survived just fine.
The thing is - when we hear a student say “Can I have more water?” we suspect what they’re ACTUALLY saying is, “I am struggling to perform in the heat and I need a minute.” 🥵
Unlike in the 80s and 90s, most of today’s kids aren’t spending hours on playgrounds or on bikes or running wild in the woods. They spend most of their time in air-conditioned spaces. Some of our adult students spend NO significant time outdoors except at their weekly riding lesson. No matter how much you preach about hydrating BEFORE the lesson, they get busy and distracted and don’t think about it. There are also a lot of medications and health conditions that make people less heat tolerant.
Maybe we’re hyperaware of this because all of our 22+ years of teaching have taken place in Georgia. Summers here can range from pleasantly hot to kinda miserable to Fire Swamp. We’ve seen people turn clammy and gray right after insisting they were fine, and we’ve had our own bouts of heat exhaustion despite extensive acclimation and knowing all the tricks. One summer, our little town mourned the loss of a high school student - a member of the football team who experienced heat stroke during a routine August practice. 😢
So. You gotta let them stop for water. But it DOESN’T have to bog down the lesson flow. Here are a few tricks:
💦 Create as many different water stations as possible. We like to use a mix of barrels and cup holders mounted to the outside of the arena fence. Every time students stop for a drink, have them carry it to a new station so the horses don’t get programmed to stop in a single spot.
💦 Lesson plan strategically! Hot weather is not the time for endless drills on the rail. Choose short, focused exercises that allow students to return to their water bottle after each repetition or turn. This IS a good time for group lessons to practice skills individually: efficient patterns and courses, transitions on the centerline, leg yields, mini longe line sessions, etc.
💦 Build a longer break into the middle of the lesson where everyone can play a word game, answer trivia questions, etc. This is a great time to get some HorseSense Levels objectives checked off.
💦 Help your students beat the heat in other ways. For example, when our summer temps really kick in, we REQUIRE our students and horses to come out to the arena wet. Some students prefer a gentle mist from the hose nozzle while others like to just dump it over their head. (Sidebar: this is how WE as instructors survive long hours on hot sand. Cold wet hair is a game changer!) Cooling towels and helmet inserts can also make a big difference.
💦 Don’t forget about hydration for the horses! 🐴
