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Lateral Work
My lesson this week was good, really good. I think part of it was the little break I had gave things time to sort of sink in and settle. It also meant, when I got on, I was determined to get right to work. Which meant the horse was getting right to work; I wanted to ride, not muck about for the first ten minutes asking the horse to pay attention. The horse also seemed in a good mood, and so off we went.
The only hiccup was the time I was going across the diagonal and couldn’t quite figure out what I was doing, so we did a shoulder in instead of a haunches in. Whoops.
I am curious—anyone who rides haunches in and shoulder in—how do you set up for it?
Having ridden in a couple barns, I’ve learned a couple different ways, but the one that makes most sense to me is to use a circle and, for the haunches in especially, the arena corners.
I was taught the shoulder in by doing a ten meter circle to establish the bend, and then at the finish of the first circle, taking one step as if we were going to do a second circle, the sending the horse down the rail. Once I understood the correct bend, we didn’t do the first circle, but thinking about a circle is still the easiest way for me to set up the shoulder in.
The haunches in we also started with a ten meter circle, but when the horse’s front end was on the track and the hind end hadn’t made that last step, then we’d go down the rail.
Once I understood the bend we were going for, we would use the corners before the long side. For the shoulder in, use the bend of the corner to set up the bend as if you were going to do a ten meter circle there, but take the horse down the rail after that first half step off the rail. For the haunches in, ride into the corner as if riding into a circle, but at the top of the corner don’t let the hindquarters take that last step onto the long rail—ride down the rail instead.
And later, of course, it progressed into asking for the lateral movements anywhere in the arena, and especially on the quarterlines to test the balance of my aids without the wall to help, but by starting on the circle I had a better idea of how everything worked together and learned to think of the lateral movements as a connected movement from front to back, and not something that was done by positioning the hindquarters here or the shoulders there.
Having ridden in a couple barns, I know all instructors approach these a little differently, so I’m curious about what works for other people. It’s always interesting to hear other approaches; you never know when they’ll come in handy.
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