Blog :: Progress Journal
July 2008
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.
June 2008
Life is better when you’re forward
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but there is nothing like the feeling of riding a truly forward horse.
The horse is straight because he’s thinking about where he’s going, not that inviting patch of grass over there. The stride is longer and more elastic, making it easier to feel what is happening, since the horse is relaxed and not resisting. There’s energy to work with and, most importantly, that energy can be directed into an exercise instead of being directed to fix whatever problems have cropped up with a non-forward horse (crookedness, stiffness and resistance to the aids, etc.)
If you’ve felt it, you already know what I mean. It’s one of those feelings you never forget. Except for me, because it surprises me every. single. time.
You know, some higher life forms have the ability to abstract concepts and apply them to multiple situations without requiring proof. Me, I’m like a kid with a jack-in-the-box. “So… if I make the horse go forward at the trot, is it easier to sit? It is! Oh my god! And what if I go forward at the walk, will our leg yields improve? They do! Oh my god! And if we are forward in the canter and then ask for a simple change? Wow! Does the little clown pop up every time I turn the handle? Are you sure? What happens if I go forward into a shoulder-in? Can we try it and see?”
Yeah, I’m not so bright sometimes.
Self-directed sarcasm aside, what a feeling it is. Everything comes together, and suddenly there is all the time in the world to make the next movement. And like a rider who can see the distances on a jump course, I can suddenly “see” where every footfall is going to go, and feel exactly what I need to do to get us to the spot we need to be. Riding is easy in those moments. I love those moments. Wanting more of those moments, quite honestly, is why I ride at all.
May 2008
What a Week
I’m not even going to tell you how many moments of sheer stupidity I had, but they started with having absolutely no idea what day of the week it was until mid-day today, when I learned it was Friday, not Thursday as I thought. Darn those three-day weekends; they’ll get you every time.
But riding wise—the last few weeks, we’ve been working on establishing contact with the horse, which means having to deal with the fact that I want to throw the reins away as soon as I feel the horse on the other end of them.
My frustration with all of this is self-directed: I know what I need to do, I can even feel when I lose the contact, but I can’t make my body do what it needs to do. Or, if I can, I’m not quick enough. I keep waiting for that magic switch to kick in, so that the exercise becomes as instinctive as posting.
In all this struggle for me to “get” it, my instructor has been really good at switching things around—giving me new techniques to try, or having me focus on different things, or changing the pattern I’m riding in the arena. Which is exactly what you have to do with me. I’m not one of those riders who can go around in a circle for the entire lesson and focus on the same thing the entire time. It drives me nuts. I’m sure you’ve known horses like this—they get bored and frustrated with the constant repetition and it starts to work against the exercise. That’s me, too.
If I ever step back into the show ring, you can bet I’ll ride the most complicated test I reasonably can. I would ride Intro 4 over Intro 1, for example. Not because I think I’m too good for Intro 1, but because I would be a nervous wreck and the least helpful thing I could do would be to ride an easier test. Much better to ride something complicated, where I really have to think about what I’m doing and where I’m going so there’s less time to psych myself out. I’ve noticed when I look over my old test scores that there are a lot more Test 3’s and Test 4’s in the mix than there are Test 1’s and Test 2’s.
So drilling an exercise until I’m perfect at it doesn’t work for me. I don’t learn that way. I learn better if I drill it until I sort of have it, but maybe not entirely. Then I need to move on to another exercise that incorporates the troublesome exercise without focusing on it.
I’m not saying I should be trying 1-tempi changes if I can’t get 3-tempis or anything like that (oh, to be at a place where that was my concern!)—but back when I learned to do a shoulder in, for example, we focused on it for a lesson or two and then moved the shoulder ins to the warm up or cool down, or else did exercises that started with a shoulder in and went into something else. When shoulder ins became part of a broader context, they finally made sense and I was able to break through the problems I was having.
Gosh, I love it when I have my whole learning process so perfectly mapped out like this. Life looks so easy. Here’s the solution! Go forth and ride!
Yeah, right. It’s one thing to know how I learn best, it’s another thing to really believe, when I’m in the middle of not getting an exercise, that I really do need to move on and try something different before I drive the instructor, the horse, and myself entirely insane. I want to be perfect now, darn it, not in a couple weeks when things have synthesized.
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.)
April 2008
Half passes vs. leg yields, reclarified
Remember how stuck I get on the half pass vs. leg yield issue? I think I have my brain wrapped around it now.
Watch this video (sorry, can’t embed it here—you’ll have to see it via YouTube).
Notice how much collection and impulsion the horse has. Also notice they are doing a shoulder in to the half pass—by the end of the video, it’s a five meter circle to the shoulder in to the half pass. Look at how much reach the outside hind has to have, and how it’s the outside hind pushing the horse forward and sideways, not that the horse is dragged towards the wall by his shoulders. Even for a horse with less extravagant movement, you can see that the horse would have to be collected and pushing from behind to do this movement.
So now I can understand the progression. One of the first lateral moves you teach to horses and riders is the leg yield, because you don’t have to worry about collection. You’re establishing the idea that it’s possible to move both forward and sideways. Then you refine that with the shoulder in and renvers, where you’re moving part of the horse’s body laterally (vs. the whole body movement of the leg yield). But for a shoulder in to really work, you also have to teach a degree of collection—the horse has to rock back on his hind end and push from behind, otherwise you’re just yanking his shoulders off the rail with the rein and you’re not going anywhere. And then—well, you can see in the video that they use the shoulder in to establish the correct bend, and then ask for sideways movement as well as forward movement in the half pass. To get that movement, you need an even greater degree of collection.
So that last post I had on this issue, about the bend of the horse, isn’t quite right. It’s not the bend in and of itself that makes the half pass more difficult—it’s the degree of collection required. Watch some YouTube videos of leg yields, and then watch some of the half pass. I found it especially helpful to watch the outside hind. There’s a significant, obvious difference in the degree of strength and engagement required for the half pass, and that’s going to come from the horse being able to collect.
I asked about the leg yield vs. half pass in my lesson today, and we ended up working on them for the whole lesson. Then I came home and watched YouTube videos. Amazing how that helps clarify things.