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Can I play hunter/jumper for a while?
Don’t worry; I have plenty of cheese to go with this whine.
I’ve said before that my background is primarily hunter/jumper, and almost all the dressage I’ve done has been in a seat somewhere between the hunter/jumper forward seat and a true dressage seat. This has worked for me, and has been good for me in a lot of ways, but now, of course, my trainer and I are working on developing a real dressage seat.
It’s hard. It’s really hard. Every time the horse and I get stuck, I want to tip forward on my pelvis and get my seatbones off the saddle.
And trust me: it’s not that I think hunter/jumper riders have it easy, or that it’s so much easier to ride in a forward seat. It’s just that it’s instinctive for me. I know those aids. My body will default to those aids without having to think about it. I have to think really hard about dressage aids.
Wah, wah, wah.
I feel better now.
On the plus side, I think I’m starting to get riding into the contact back. Somewhere along the line, I apparently developed a fear of riding into contact, so that as soon as the horse reaches into the bridle, I want to throw the reins away. I have no idea where this came from; it’s certainly not how I was trained. How frustrating.
I think part of it is a barely-conscious fear that if I ride with real contact, the horse will fall behind my leg aids and I’ll end up with a horse moving with a hollow back and a false headset. Whereas if I drop the contact, I can focus on riding the horse forward from the leg. Or something. In this age of multi-tasking, sometimes I despair at my ability to get my aids working independently.
Self analyzing aside, my last lesson was better. Much better. More consistency, and by the end I remembered that I could indeed reestablish power from behind if we got a little stuck—without having to toss the horse’s head away and start all over.
(The other lesson learned: do not forget how tall the horse you’re riding is. Smaller horses can have huge stretchy movement that feels like a large horse, but if you dismount from a 15hh horse as if it were a 17hh horse, you’re going to hit the ground a little before you expect it. And that’s awkward.)
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