Eddo Hoekstra Clinic Part I: Obervations

24 October 2010 2 Comments

Sonesta Farms held a clinic with Eddo Hoekstra this weekend. I audited some sessions on all four days (Thurs - Sun) and had sessions on Ro on Sat/Sun. I had video taken of my rides, and I’ll put the highlights up once I get it.

Some general observations:

He wanted the riders to do less but do it correctly and allow the horses to figure things out for themselves. He told several riders to use less or quieter aids, and he was very consistent about asking riders to keep their hands upright and close together. Most riders who wore spurs were told to use them less. On Ro, I was told to use only my leg right below the knee when asking her to straighten and move into the outside rein—not my entire lower leg. You could see all the horses respond to this. As the riders got quieter and softer, so did the horses.

The word of the weekend was “rebalance.” There was some discussion among the auditors early on about what he meant by that, and the general consensus was “half halt.” I don’t think so. When he said “rebalance,” you could see the riders fixing their position first and, sometimes, also half halting. The few times he said just half halt, the riders would half halt without fixing themselves. By the time I rode on Saturday, I was pretty sure that rebalance meant “fix yourself first, then the horse,” and that held true through my session with Ro—every time he said “rebalance,” I had crept out of position. A half halt might be part of the overall rebalancing, but the two are not synonymous.

The phrase of the weekend was “If you were in a car, you’d be in a ditch right now.” He very much wanted riders to maintain the pattern no matter what the horse did. They could miss a transition, get a transition late, or just flub everything up entirely, but he wanted them on whatever line the exercise was supposed to be on. If you were on an octagon, you needed to stay on the octagon. If you were on a circle, stay on the circle. If you were going down the long side, you needed to stay on the long side—not wander into the quarter line.

If the horse offered something unexpected to the riders, he wanted the riders to differentiate between “no” and “not now.” He never wanted the horse punished for breaking into a canter. You let them canter on and then come back to the trot. If you ask for the canter and get the wrong lead, you continue on—especially if it’s counter canter and harder for the horse. If you are at the walk and the horse trots, you continue the exercise in the trot—but make sure it is a connected, purposeful trot. You didn’t go on and on in the unexpected gait, but you went on long enough to acknowledge what the horse wanted before saying, “But this isn’t what *I* want, so we’re going to try again.” It was the difference between constantly shutting a horse down so they would be afraid to offer more later and negotiating with the horse so that things did not go entirely off track.

But it did not mean the horse could blow through the riders’ aids and do whatever they wanted. On horses that were consistently blowing through the aids, he often turned to a series of rapid-fire exercises designed to get the horse and rider thinking and back together again. Although horses may be naturally good at some things and those things are fun to work on, you can’t entirely ignore the things that are hard for the horse just because the horse doesn’t want to do them.

He also wanted riders to take risks and make things more like fun and play. One of the first comments he made to me was that Ro wasn’t a baby horse and I needed to sit back and ride her like a real horse. With other riders, he wanted them to push for more in the gaits. Or he wanted riders to just try something for the fun of it. He thought Ro could be doing flying changes in a couple weeks—not schooling them routinely, but he bet that if I asked just to see what happened, she would give them to me.

The idea of risk tasking goes back to the rider doing less and negotiating between no, not now, and yes—the rider needs to keep doors open for the horse to do things. Maybe unexpected things—he likes a forward horse who isn’t afraid to be a little naughty and test what it can do with the open doors.

And if you take a risk and things go wrong? You rebalance and reconsider the situation—maybe repeat the exercise, maybe find a different exercise to achieve the end you originally wanted. As he said to several riders when things went wrong: “You are just as close to something you do want as something you don’t want.”

Some of the best rides to watch were not the riders who were finessing things at whatever level they were working at, but the ones who had things going “wrong” all over the place—very energetic horses, horses blowing through the aids, etc. He had the riders work with that energy, or he had them focus on the horse/rider communication, and by the end of the session there were some very dramatic changes in their way of going. Whatever went wrong could also go right—and he got the horses and riders there by never shutting the horse down entirely. Make sure the rider is correct, make sure the horse is balanced, straight, and forward, and everything else is variables you can play with from moment to moment until you get to the place you want to be at.

Horses and Riding, Progress and Training, Training the Rider, Training the Horse, Shows and Clinics

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