Guest Speaker: Ashleigh Sanderson

Ashleigh is a British-based horse trainer and riding coach, originally from Zimbabwe.

She began her career following a traditional pathway, training and qualifying through the British Horse Society, the South African National Equestrian Federation, and the International Group of Equestrian Qualifications. She competed across multiple disciplines including eventing, dressage, show jumping, equitation and showing, while running her own riding school and livery yard, teaching riders of all ages and levels.

Despite ticking all the boxes, something didn’t sit right.

Ashleigh found that while she could see what needed to change in a horse or rider, and could feel it, she often couldn’t find the words to explain it.

That changed when she began working with Mary Wanless and became an accredited Ride With Your Mind (RWYM) trainer. This opened up a completely different way of understanding movement, learning, and communication between horse and rider.

Today, Ashleigh combines her experience, curiosity, and ongoing exploration, both physically and mentally, to approach equitation from a fresh perspective. Her work focuses on helping horses and humans better understand movement, balance, and body awareness in a way that is practical, thoughtful, and deeply effective.

What is Proprioception?

Imagine this is you, on the rock. What are you doing? Standing, sitting, lying down?

Your body tells you that you are standing up… Your brain tells you that you are perched on a rock… Your body, your muscles, tendons, fascia, ligaments, vestibular system, tell you how high you are, how close to the edge, where to step, how far you would have to jump to the next stepping stone, or how to get down without landing on a sharp stone…

What is Equine Proprioception?

And why do I need to help my horse with it?

Horses have lost their feet… Through breeding for hypermobility, bigger movement and faster jumping times, we have destabilised the species. In the wild, herds of horse still gallop over rough terrain and know where their feet are. Our domesticated horses have had difficulties bred into them, and the unnatural environment that many horses live in means that they don’t get the natural stimuli that wild horses live with. Horses show “behaviour issues” such as difficult to load, resistant to hoof maintenance, spookiness or anxiety and in many cases it is from the feeling of being out of balance in their own body.

Read more about Ashleigh's work here: https://www.kudaguru.com/