Jake Lundahl is a professional horseman. He is passionate about colt starting, bridle horse training, and helping riders level up from “zero” to mastery. Known for his sharp insights and common sense teaching style, Jake has a gift for breaking complex ideas into simple, practical steps. Join us as Jake shares his most groundbreaking experiences, helpful advice, and no-BS lessons for training horses that work and win. If you’re a rider or owner who’s always searching for better answers, connecting dots across disciplines, and figuring things out as you go, you’ll feel right at home here.
Jake shares the intense journey of building his Foundations of Excellence program, centering on a wild story about debugging code at 4:30 AM, that led to a breakthrough "fever dream" about invisible architectures in both programming and horsemanship.
After spending hundreds of hours fixing a $2 billion ed-tech company's broken "premium" software, Jake discovered that horse training problems often mirror coding problems: both involve hidden structures and legacy "spaghetti code" that sabotages progress. He explains how bad training ideas create mental architecture that actively fights against learning, using a real example of a dressage student who couldn't grasp the concept of allowing horses to make mistakes as teaching opportunities.
The episode dives deep into diagnostic horsemanship; the ability to see the load-bearing structures that are often hidden from view, understand first principles of how horses think and respond, and escape the "intermediate no man's land" where most riders get stuck fighting invisible problems they don't understand.
Get Foundations of Excellence:
https://www.lundahlperformance.com/foe
17 Oct 2025
The Injury Stats Keeping Me Up At Night
The horsemanship industry, for all its lofty ideals and bleeding-heart woo-woo mindfulness garbage, is failing to protect riders. Horse injuries have spiked 139% in riders 65+, despite total injuries across all age groups are lower. And the severity of the injuries has increased. This means that when falls happen, despite widespread use of modern safety gear like protective helmets and vests, traumatic brain and spinal injuries are actually MORE frequent. The data is clear: the modern horsemanship industry is failing to promote safety. Modern riders and horses are LESS well trained and LESS capable than ever. Helmets are the only thing holding back this flood of incompetence.
This episode is a call for a re-orientation of horsemanship instruction toward SAFETY and away from nebulous concepts like "connection" and "attunement". Because that stuff isn't working. And it's pretty hard to be "attuned" when your pelvis is broken.
[Citations]
Equestrian Related Injuries: A National Database Study | AOAO
https://aoao.org/2024/04/24/equestrian-related-injuries-a-national-database-study/
Sports and Recreational Injuries - Injury Facts
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/sports-and-recreational-injuries/
Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Injuries Related to Individual and Team Sports: An Analysis of the NEISS Database Between 2017 and 2021 - PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37900862/
Sports and Recreational Injuries - Injury Facts
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/sports-and-recreational-injuries/
Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Injuries Related to Individual and Team Sports: An Analysis of the NEISS Database Between 2017 and 2021 - PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37900862/
Injury Patterns and Associated Demographic Characteristics in Children with a Fracture from Equines: A US National Based Study
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/11/12/1443
Illustrations of three key branching points of the survey:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/llustrations-of-three-key-branching-points-of-the-survey-A-C_fig1_347862914
[PDF] Horse Riding Accident Statistics in 2023 (U.S. Data)
https://www.biamo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HorsesOnly-Horse-Riding-Accident-Statistics-in-2023-website-article.pdf
Spinal Injuries from Equestrian Activity: A US Nationwide Study - PMC
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12250276/
Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Injuries Related to Individual and Team Sports: An Analysis of the NEISS Database Between 2017 and 2021 - PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37900862/
Covid-19-and-final-2020-NEISS-estimates-March-December-6b6_edited20210607_0
https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/Covid-19-and-final-2020-NEISS-estimates-March-December-6b6_edited20210607_0.pdf
Injury Patterns and Associated Demographic Characteristics in Children with a Fracture from Equines: A US National Based Study
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/11/12/1443
Spinal Injuries from Equestrian Activity: A US Nationwide Study - PMC
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12250276/
Equestrian Related Injuries: A National Database Study | AOAO
https://aoao.org/2024/04/24/equestrian-related-injuries-a-national-database-study/
Equestrian Related Injuries: A National Database Study | AOAO
https://aoao.org/2024/04/24/equestrian-related-injuries-a-national-database-study/
Injury Patterns and Associated Demographic Characteristics in Children with a Fracture from Equines: A US National Based Study
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/11/12/1443
Sports and Recreational Injuries - Injury Facts
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/sports-and-recreational-injuries/
[/citations]
4 Sept 2025
The Turning Point Into True Collection
Many riders chase surface-level appearances and miss what true collection actually feels like: lift at the withers, hindquarters engaged, front end light. In this episode, Jake explains why face-checking cycles fail and how true self-carriage emerges when softness and steering fuse together through the neck rein. The key moment to introduce this concept to the horse is what he calls the "turning point" —a subtle give at the withers in response to indirect rein pressure, where guiding and gathering become one. If you can recognize and reward that shift, you stop babysitting your horse’s frame and start cultivating collection that carries through transitions, circles, and straight lines without constant nagging.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
4.8 / 5
73 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 25 / 100
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Quality
29
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
51
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