Jec A. Ballou’s distinct love of training and developing horses of all levels is fed by her eclectic background. Raised in a horse training family, she’s gone on to become not only a teacher in her own right but also an author, a philosopher, an athlete, and a poet.

In 2005, she wrote and published 101 Dressage Exercises for Horse and Rider to meet what she saw as a great need within the industry for simple, clear, and practical information for riders to improve their equine athletes. The book’s overwhelming success has proven this to be true. It remains one of the top sellers of all equine instruction books and has been translated into three foreign languages.

She followed the success of this first book with Equine Fitness: a Program of Exercises and Routines for Your Horse in 2009. Jec has also been a headline speaker at Western States Horse Expo, American Youth Horse Council, various breed organizations, and has written articles for every major U.S. equestrian magazine. Most prominent in the dressage competition scene, she has trained and competed through the FEI levels but has also competed in long distance trail riding, breed shows, and almost everything in between. She won three consecutive East Coast championships in distance riding, becoming the youngest rider in history to win the prestigious Vermont 100 Mile Competition.

For most of her life, Jec has immersed herself in the study of classical dressage training, including ten intensive training residencies in Portugal, two training residencies in Holland, and one residency in Germany with the late Egon von Neindorff. Most recently, she has studied in Melbourne, Australia with Manolo Mendez, original head rider of the Royal School of Equestrian Arts in Spain, and now hosts Mendez for clinics in California. She has worked with over 20 breeds of horses and continues to enjoy the day-to-day journey of training—and learning from—horses, working tirelessly as an advocate for the understanding that proper biomechanical movement and athleticism can never happen as a result of short-cuts, force, or hurried training methods.