My passion for horses started early – I learned to read early just to devour horse books! I begged my neighbour to ride her elderly welsh cob, Betty (below), who only had two speeds of stop and gallop!

Though I rode and competed in showing and eventing in my youth, I took a twenty-year break before returning to the saddle as an adult.

My background as a physiotherapist and movement coach helped the re-learning, but mastering skilled riding remains an ongoing journey.

Like all riders seeking excellence, I continue to learn and grow.

I have the same struggles in the saddle as most other adult learners, but I'm lucky I have professional skills to help sort them out for us all to improve together!

Physiotherapy has allowed me to study how many different athletes use their bodies.

I worked with diverse athletic groups – from footballers to rock climbers to dancers. Each of them taught me about the different needs of specific training for sport, beyond general fitness and mobility.

My experience treating elite equestrians across all riding disciplines at the NSW Institute of Sport provided unique insights into the physical demands of high-level equestrian sport.

I had stopped riding horses when I started university, and I thought that I would never get back into the sport.

When I stopped riding horses, I had my own "real" athletic career in Mountain Bike and Adventure Racing.

My "iron horse" and I explored Australia's challenging terrain, looking out for the best steep hills and muddy trails to test our physical and mental capacity.

Through years of endurance sports, particularly adventure racing, I learned about physical conditioning and discovered my true capabilities.

Racing for 30+ hours across multiple disciplines – cycling, running, and kayaking – taught me that we all have untapped potential.

You just need to push yourself beyond your comfort zone to find it.

A wonderful twist of fate brought me a Portuguese husband and the chance to ride beautiful Lusitano horses in Portugal in 2018.

If you've ridden when you were young, and then you re-start as an adult, you'll recall the rude awakening of a body that no longer knows how to speak "horse" and a position that feels like a sack of potatoes!

But the passion for horses was back in my life, and I took it home with me to Shanghai where I was living at the time. I was amazed that I found an excellent riding centre and wonderful German instructors in this Chinese mega city.

Here I met Mango (below), a native Mongolian pony who had been trained for dressage by one of the German teachers. Mango taught me so much about using clear and effective aids (because if you didn't ask him right, he would happily ignore you!)

When I moved home to Australia from China in 2022, I needed to find somewhere to ride. I didn't want to buy a horse immediately, and I missed the riding school community we had in China.

Luckily for me, a good friend suggested I try Wandin Riding Academy in Victoria's Yarra Valley.

Under the watchful eye of Angela Anker and her team, I took the lease on an older pony in need of retraining. Quickly, I found where my skills ended, and how much opportunity for learning this pony was going to give me!

Learning better feel and timing, and optimising my own position made me really curious about how we teach riders to develop thinking bodies and optimise performance for the horse and rider working together.

I had worked a lot with horse riders earlier in my career, and I had loved that work. I had developed my professional skills in many different directions since that time, which would only improve what I could teach others!

In 2024, I decided that I needed to follow my heart and start working with horses and riders again, while continuing my own riding journey.

I've been a physiotherapist for 20 years, and in that time, I have worked with people from all walks of life, across the globe.

What they have all had in common is they have all worked hard to become "better" day by day, based on their definitions of growth and success.

Although I started out in sports physiotherapy, I developed my clinical specialty in chronic pain recovery and understanding the brain's involvement in pain and performance.

I've spent the past 10 years working to develop a deep understanding of complex interactions of the nervous system with the immune and hormone systems PLUS train high performance movement skills.

My goal is to bring a wider perspective to equestrian athletic performance, based on developing greater feel, sensitivity and perception of the human body, on top of the usual strength and mobility.

As a rider, I'll be documenting and sharing the journey of my life-long learning in the saddle, testing my systems and knowledge on myself along the way too.

I'm always keen to hear about opportunities to help riders and better understand the problems that you're having in the saddle, so we can solve them together.

If you have a group or a club that would benefit from learning more, I love speaking to groups and sharing information widely.

If you've got a group of friends who'd like to do an assessment and learning session together, we can also make that work.

I've always made a point of helping out where I can, so you might also meet me marshalling a showjump arena at Boneo Park a few times a year, or pencilling for the dressage at Wandin International Horse Trials.