The NOËLLE FLOYD Podcast

Your horse grabs the fence board. Arches the neck. Pulls back, and you hear that low gulp of air. What is that horse telling you? For years we called horse cribbing a stable vice. Something to stop. Something to strap a collar around. Dr. Carissa Wickens has spent her career listening to it instead. She is an associate professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida, and horse cribbing h...

Last year my horse G slid down the side of a mountain in the Tetons. He came out of it okay. I carried it for a lot longer. Gillian Larson has spent her twenties and now her thirties trail riding the backcountry from Mexico to Canada, more than once, on the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide, the Arizona Trail and the Colorado Trail. She calls herself a thru-rider. She recently raced acro...

What does it cost to go and find out who you are? For me, it cost a house. I sold mine to travel 25,000 miles across North America with my horses, Lady and G, and I filmed all of it. That road became Unbridled, a six-part horse documentary series. Episodes 1 and 2 are on YouTube now. This time the microphone turned around. Jen Landon, actor, Yellowstone cast member, horsewoman, and the person who...

Is the horse-human bond the ultimate secret to better training? Watch the trailer as professional horsewoman Noëlle Floyd launches her new six-part documentary series NOËLLE FLOYD: UNBRIDLED. 🐴 Subscribe for more horse training & equestrian insights: https://noellefloyd.com 💻 Catch the SEASON PREMIERE on Youtube MONDAY, OCTOBER 19 AT 4PM ET and binge the whole season! at NF+ https://noellefloyd....

I wrote my mare a letter the day she came to me. Out in the field with her, with G grazing nearby, I read it to her out loud for the first time. It is the most honest thing I have said about horsemanship in fourteen years. Fourteen years I spent interviewing the horse world's best — the trainers and riders everyone turns to for answers. Then Lady arrived, more wild than tame, and I stepped in fron...

The same patience it takes to earn a horse's trust is the patience Evan the Groom brings to teaching the rest of us. He came to horses the way most people never do — from the outside, with no background, terrified of the biggest one in the barn — and turned that beginner's-eye view into an education. Today he does the horse grooming and horse care in his wife's dressage business, and the horse wor...

A horse has two choices. Learn to accept the bit, or fight it for the rest of its life. That's Steffen Peters, and this is the half where his hands are on the reins. If you heard Part 1, you met the man — six Olympics, the dark place, the way back. This one is the horse training — the groundwork up through Grand Prix. Forty years of it, distilled into the way he starts a five-year-old and the way...

When did you make it? Ask most riders that question and they'll point to a medal. Steffen Peters points somewhere else — to the darkest place he has ever been, and the way back out of it. This is Part 1 of my conversation with a six-time Olympian, and we barely touch a rein. Forty years of horse training sit behind this man, and the first thing he wants to talk about isn't a horse. It's the thing...

There's one horse you would cross the country for. You know the one. The horse who found you when you had the least to give and somehow handed you back to yourself. Now hold that horse in your mind, and sit with this: roughly 20,000 of them a year get loaded onto trailers bound for Canada and Mexico, and it reaches every kind of horse — the show jumper, the Thoroughbred who ran too slow, the lesso...

You get the thing you chased for five years. And the ride is the worst one you've ever put down. Kasey Perry-Glass reached the Olympic Games on the horse she bought to take her there — Doublé — and came home into a depression that blindsided her. This is the conversation under the medal photo. What it costs to want something that badly, and what she found on the far side of it. She married a cowbo...

You think the cow is the hard part. She isn't. You are. You get ahead of her to turn her, and she beats you to the herd every time. You spur, you pull, the horse's head comes up, and now nobody is watching the cow at all. Martin Black has read millions of head of cattle, and the horse training lesson underneath all of it is the one almost everybody gets backwards. To cut one cow out, you leave her...

We pat our horses to tell them they did well. Martin Black says the horse would rather we kept our hands to ourselves. He has spent a life inside western horse training — starting close to five hundred colts a year on the same Great Basin country his family has ranched since the 1860s, seventy miles from his nearest neighbor, the road over the mountain closed all winter. And what he showed me this...

When I was eleven, my mom handed me The Man Who Listens to Horses. Last week, the man who wrote it died. Within days, the horse world also lost Alexandra Kurland — the woman who spent decades convincing us that a clicker and a handful of food belonged in serious horse training. This is a solo episode. An essay, read aloud, on two pioneers who stood in opposite corners of horse training and still m...

You measure with your hand while he stands there. Then he takes a step, and the horse you measured is gone. Saddle fit is horse care. I rode my whole life before anyone said that to me plainly. I met Letitia Glenn , founder of Contour Saddlery™ , at Road to the Horse. She had seen footage of me riding, and the first thing she thought—which she then said to my face, out loud—was that I did not know...

We say we want a willing horse. Then we climb on, and we start cramming. And when the horse gets tight, or slow, or stuck, we do the one thing that guarantees it gets worse — we add pressure. This is Part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Stephen Peters, and this time he brought a horse's brain. Cut in half, in his hands, on the table between us. He points to the cingulate. He points to the little kid...

Every rider has said it. He's being stubborn. She's testing me. He knows better. Here's the harder, truer thing underneath: the horse isn't being anything. The horse is a nervous system, doing the one job every nervous system has — trying to stay safe. Dr. Stephen Peters spends this conversation taking me under the behavior, into the brain that produced it. He's a neuropsychologist, co-author of E...

Everybody wants the clear round. The win. The photo at the top of the podium. Here's the part the sport keeps offstage — the doubt, the grief, the voice at the in-gate asking if you even belong here. Joe Stockdale knows that voice well. He calls it imposter syndrome, and he feels it at the very top of show jumping, which is its own kind of honesty for a 26-year-old already riding at five-star. In...

There is a question almost every one of us carries to the barn and never says out loud. Not how do I get him to do this. But: does he actually trust me — or is he just complying? This is Part 2 of my conversation with Elsa Sinclair, and it's the half where I kept having to stop and close my eyes. Because Elsa reads horse behavior in a way most of us were never taught to. She breaks leadership into...

Most of us learned to ride before we ever learned to ask. We learned the halter, the rope, the pressure, the release. We learned how to make a horse do the thing. And somewhere in there, quietly, a lot of us started to feel that something about it wasn't quite right — and didn't have the words, or the permission, to say so. Elsa Sinclair had that feeling at twelve. She's the creator of Freedom Bas...

Right now, somewhere in the horse world, a horse is shedding a virus it's carried since it was a foal. Its owner doesn't know. The horse looks fine. That's EHV-1. Equine herpesvirus. And Dr. Bruno Karam, equine internal medicine specialist, wants you to understand it before the next outbreak — not during it. We recorded this conversation in the wake of last year's EHV-1 cluster at the National Fin...

Have you ever moved through a community — any community — feeling like you were watching from just outside the circle? Like everyone else had found their tribe and you were still looking? That feeling of not belonging might not be something to fix. It might be exactly what makes you exceptional. In this first solo episode of the Noelle Floyd Podcast, Noëlle Floyd makes the case that not belonging...

It is easy to get wrapped up in the competitive environment when prize money and recognition wait at the gate. Our natural human instinct causes us to objectify horses as high-speed pieces of equipment or treat them like sentimental human pets, yet both approaches cause immense confusion for the animal. When challenges arise, a rider focuses strictly on overriding the obstacle in front of them, wh...

We have all walked into the barn carrying the weight of a chaotic day, a mile-long to-do list, and a rider ego that thinks jumping twenty fences is the only way to improve. We get clumsy because we try hard to chase points, ribbons, and instant gratification. We end up losing the horse.  Three-time Olympian Daniel Bluman helps us trade that frantic energy for a higher standard. Daniel represents I...

What if everything you've been calling a behavior problem is actually your horse asking for help? On this episode of Dear Horse World, Noëlle sits down with Jim Masterson — founder of the Masterson Method and a leading voice in equine bodywork for horse owners — to explore exactly that question. Jim has worked hands-on with an estimated 700 horses a year at peak, trained over 10,000 students world...

Liberty trainer and Braveheart Beasts founder Kaleigh Marie shares how training oxen, mammoth donkeys, and mules before ever seriously working with horses shaped everything she knows about connection, trust, and the nervous system. Kaleigh Marie is a liberty trainer and performer based in the Northeast who has spent the last decade developing a nervous system-informed approach to horsemanship root...