Recording Your Riding Lesson: How to Ask, and What to Do With It
I have recorded hundreds of my rides. For years I pressed my spouse, or any auditor who happened to be standing at the rail, into service with a camcorder (I’m that many years old!) or my phone. Some of those videos are old enough that nothing I own will play them anymore. The rest are gathering the digital equivalent of dust on thumb drives and in a cloud folder I rarely open.
Most of them got watched once. Sometimes just long enough to get frustrated with what I saw. More recently, long enough to find a nice clip for social media. What I never got out of any of them was concrete help with my riding.
The frustrating part is that the help was often right there. Most lesson videos have the trainer’s voice on them. I had years of instruction recorded, and I never pulled the words out.
Recording, it turns out, was never my problem. Getting something out of the recording was. That part has finally changed, and I’ll get to it. But if you aren’t recording your lessons yet, start with the ask.
Asking is easier than it feels
For a long time, asking felt like a burden. Not because I thought my coaches would refuse, but because it felt awkward, as if I didn’t trust the lesson to land on its own.
Then I got in the habit of asking, and every coach I’ve worked with said yes. These days I set my phone down near Martin and he starts the recording himself before I’ve said a word.
It’s worth understanding why the ask feels bigger than it is. Part of it is that a recording is permanent and a memory isn’t, and permanence implies scrutiny. Part of it is that adult amateurs already worry about being too much trouble, and this feels like one more request on top of a lesson we’re anxious about deserving. And part of it is that we’ve all seen a clip of a trainer taken out of context and posted somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and we don’t want to be anywhere near that.
Strip all of that away and recording a lesson is just note-taking that works. You paid for forty-five minutes of expert instruction. Nobody thinks it’s strange to take notes in a lecture you paid for. The only difference is that you can’t write while you ride, and your attention belongs on the horse anyway.
The point isn’t to evaluate your trainer. It’s to stop losing what your trainer already gave you.
How to ask
Keep it short and specific, and say what you’ll do with the recording. Three versions, depending on your situation.
Before a regular lesson, in person:
Would you mind if I set my phone down to record the audio? I keep losing half of what you tell me by the time I get home. It’s just for me, and I’m happy to share what I pull out of it with you.
By text, ahead of time, if you’d rather not put someone on the spot:
Quick question before Thursday. Would it be all right if I record the audio of our lessons? I want to be able to go back and actually work on what you’ve told me instead of guessing. Nothing goes anywhere but my own notes.
In a group lesson or at a clinic:
Ask the organizer first, not just the clinician, and be clear you’ll only keep your own ride. Other riders are in that arena and they didn’t agree to anything. Some clinics have a blanket no-recording rule, often for good reasons involving the clinician’s own arrangements, and that rule isn’t personal.
The line doing the most work in all three is the last one: I’m happy to share what I pull out of it with you. It turns the ask from surveillance into collaboration in a handful of words. And when I started arriving at lessons better prepared, the conversation changed. We stopped spending the first ten minutes reconstructing where we’d left off.
If the answer is no
Take it gracefully and don’t ask twice. There are legitimate reasons, and most have nothing to do with you. Some trainers dislike being recorded the way most of us dislike hearing our own voice. Some have had a clip posted without permission. Some have spent decades developing a method and don’t want it circulating. Some have barn or insurance policies.
You won’t have the recording, but you don’t have to lose the lesson. Before you get off, ask: What’s the one thing you want me working on this week? Then, before you drive anywhere, talk into your phone for two minutes about what your trainer said, what the exercise was, and what changed. It isn’t the lesson itself, but it’s far more than you’ll remember by dinner.
One practical note
In some parts of the United States, recording a conversation legally requires the consent of everyone in it rather than just one person. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice, but it’s one more reason to ask rather than quietly hit record and hope.
Asking also gets you a better recording. Once your trainer knows the phone is there, they’ll often project a little, repeat the important cue, or move closer when they’re saying something that matters. That help is worth more than secrecy ever was.
What to do with it once you have it
This is the part I got wrong until recently, and it’s where most people stall.
A forty-five minute audio file is not more useful than a lesson you half remember. It’s less useful, because the half-remembered lesson at least doesn’t sit on your phone generating guilt and taking up space. The rare person re-watches their lessons. I have hundreds of recordings to prove it. The file has to become something you can process in three minutes and act on this week, or it may as well not exist.
That’s what Your Dressage Lessons does. You upload the recording and get back a structured summary: what your instructor worked on, the cues they came back to more than once, three prioritized takeaways, and one thing to try on your next ride. Transcription is free, there’s no account to create, and you see how much of your instructor’s voice was captured before you decide whether the summary is worth buying. Your audio is deleted within 48 hours.
Your Dressage Lessons accepts video as well as audio, so the pile counts. That clinic with a trainer you may never ride with again, the lesson years ago where something finally clicked: if the trainer’s voice is on the recording, you can upload it now and get the summary you never made at the time. The upload checks whether the audio is clear enough before you pay anything, so an old phone video shot from the far end of the arena costs nothing to try.
The recurring cues turned out to matter more than I expected. When your trainer comes back to the outside rein five separate times in one lesson, that’s the lesson inside the lesson, and it’s exactly what you can’t notice from the saddle because you’re busy riding.
If you want the setup details first, the Recording Guide covers phones, Pivos, and dedicated recorders.
What trainers told me
When I started showing Your Dressage Lessons to trainers, I braced for resistance and got the opposite. The reaction, nearly word for word from more than one of them, was that they want their students to take responsibility for their own learning.
A rider who records her lesson, works out what mattered, and comes back the next week having actually schooled it is doing exactly that. Your trainer is far less worried about being recorded than about teaching you the same correction for the fourth time.
So ask, and don’t let the next recording join the pile. Then go see what’s already in it.