All the Excitement!!

I seriously can’t believe how great the rides Copper and I have had recently have been.

I’ve been riding around the arena with the biggest, goofiest grin on my face – I’d look like a madcap to anyone watching, but we are all by ourselves so…  

It started two weeks or so ago – I can’t really remember how many rides I’ve done since the last update, but it’s been a few. I’ve ridden during the week (we’re hiring a babysitter every Wednesday so I can ride – yay!) and the weekend, so we are actually clocking up some decent saddle time.

And to make it even better, we’ve had a ton of new AHA! moments – three to be exact!

All this excitement makes for an uber long post – so here’s the TLDR:

1. Your shoulders influence your horse’s shoulders. Keep them dropped down and back, and don’t forget to turn them from your tummy when when you are bending. 
2. Your belly button is important. Think relaxed, loose back, and supported/pulled in core. Draw your belly button back and up towards your spin to active your core and allow your horse to step more deeply underneath himself.
3. The canter aid can be confusing, but you need to use your inside hip AND your outside leg to signal the aid correctly.

 

Copper’s really struggled with circles for a while, maintaining the bend from nose, through his rib cage, to his tail.  He’d lose it through his shoulders a lot – particularly on the left rein – and I thought it might have been because he wasn’t strong enough to hold it. 

Turns out, not so much – it was me! 

One ride we were gong around on the left rein and it just clicked with me that my right shoulder was hunched up and forwards – really quite tense.  Now whether that has something to do with the fact that my right ankle was twisted a while ago and my body is still trying to protect it, or that my right ankle doesn’t stretch and flex to let my heel down as far as the left one – I’m not sure.  The point is: I was unbalanced, and that had come up through my seat into my shoulder. 

As soon as I felt that, I dropped my shoulder down and back and it was like I had poked a finger in the middle of Copper’s whither and unravelled a huge knot! 

He was twisting himself up, trying to bend the way I was insisting that he should, all the while I was all crooked – blocking his shoulders from moving freely.

I started playing with my shoulders, keeping them dropped and back when I was turning, swivelling them from my tummy – and wow! A fun new button to play with!  Copper is so much more responsive through turns, and I can really feel that connection like I couldn’t before – his shoulder mirror my shoulders and vice versa.  It was a real eye opening moment for sure. Especially when I can turn him without using my reins at all - as in, he’s on a completely looped rein, and we are doing half volte turns!

We’ve actually managed to get a few steps of a true shoulder-in because of this AHA moment.  We are working on it – it’s still quite hard for Copper, but he gets it!  So that’s been really fun too.

Then the next button I discovered was my belly button.  No joke.  :P

Okay, so I knew it always existed, but then I found out that it can influence your horse’s back and belly too!

I tried a core activation trick I had learned in Pilates – relax your back entirely, including the small of your back and your glutes.  Then, slowly draw your belly button back towards your spine and slightly up, almost like a string is pulling at the front of your pelvis.

This “tucks” the front of your core, activating it.  Funnily enough, it has the same effect on your horse!

When I did this, I felt Copper instantly lift his back and engage his abs, and not only that, step further underneath himself. It was like lifting a dam gate and the power just flowed from his hind quarters through his back, neck and then into my hands.

It was an incredible sensation – not one we could hold on to for very long unfortunately – neither of us are toned/fit enough to keep our cores so active for any length of time yet. I’ll definitely keep visiting this one often though, it’s excellent toning for the both of us.

Last but not least - a canter aid breakthrough! 

So recently I read (on the Facebook Dressage group I’m apart of) a question about the canter aid.  It basically ran along the lines of “What’s the correct aid for canter? Outside leg or inside leg?”

The answers where many and varied, but it got me thinking.  It seemed to me that using the outside leg to ask for canter was less than desirable, as some people mentioned it could cause crookedness.  But it also seemed that a LOT of people also mentioned that they’d been taught the outside leg transition technique in multiple different times and places from many different instructors.

Basically, it’s one of those tricky ones where there’s a lot of conflicting information.  I’ve personally always gone for the inside aid – lifting and scoping the inside hip – what I considered the ‘correct’ classical way to give the aid.

This has worked really well for me in the past – particularly on Copper’s good side – his right lead.  He will just lift and pop into the canter if he is balanced well to begin with.

This is not the case with his left rein – I’ve really had a lot of struggle getting him to canter properly on this rein.  He will literally run himself into the ground to pick up the left lead canter. It’s so messy that motorcycles have nothing on him!  It’s also impossible to bring this canter back into balance, so obviously it’s all kinds of wrong. 

I couldn’t figure out how to fix this canter depart. I toyed with the idea of ground poles or trying to train him to walk-canter depart which I’ve read can be easier for the horse to pick up, but really I wasn’t sure if these ideas were the best…

Spoiler: walk-canter depart when the rider doesn’t know how to ride a walk-canter depart, let alone train one, doesn’t work. I tried and we failed miserably, so I didn’t push it at all.

On a whim, I decided to try the outside leg ask with Copper today.  OH.  So THAT’S how he’s been trained to pick up canter!  It was not as neat as the inside hip scoop, but that doesn’t surprise me in the least.  Those canter transitions only happen when he is super balanced, on the aids, soft through his back and listening.

…So the inside hip scoop aid is something I have to work towards –not something I have right now.

This is a BIG game changer….

I was thrilled at how easy the canter transition was. It can be so hard to get him to canter if everything’s not already perfect, and he had been rush-y and spooky our whole ride.  When he’s like that a canter transition is a disaster – no matter which rein you are on. It’s like picking between an earthquake or a tsunami.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other and completely catastrophic!  So we literally never canter unless the ‘conditions’ of horse’s mood, schooling session, and weather are all in order.

This canter aid felt so ‘right’ for us, however, that I even switched reins and put the game face on to try it on the left rein.  AND IT WORKED!!  I was so shocked, but we got it without any scrambling and held it!  Of course, he was still leaning in a little, but it wasn’t too bad and I influenced him into balance with my seat. 

Then I was all “Is he really on the left lead??”  (That’s how rarely we canter this lead – I couldn’t even tell… (>_>)”…)   So I went to change rein and he freakin’ did a freakin’ flying change!!  A full-on bouncy, complete with back legs, freakin’ flying change!!  We even had, like, a whole right lead canter stride after it before we fell apart like a hot mess!!!! 

Of course I praised him like mad, because even though that was not what I was expecting and I was so not ready for it, he did it cleanly, and he was trying really hard to do the right thing for me.  *squeee*   I even have that little bubble of joy and pride welling up in my chest as I think about it.

My horse is a champ.

- I iz champine! -

AND THEN (if you are not already dying at the length of this post already!) we went on to do some awesome trot work!  His stride was really free and relaxed, his back was up and soft and we had some great walk-trot and trot-walk transitions off my seat. 

I was really impressed by this because he’s usually so worked up after cantering that it’s really hard to get him back into a ‘soft’ frame of mind for any trot work. He is usually all “WHHHEEEE!! I wants to rhun forevah naow!!!”

And noted, he still did have that, but the fact that I was able to get him to find his marbles (brain) again was pretty dang cool.  That’s also something we’ve been really struggling with  - also adding very much to my reluctance to canter, because once we did I felt like the chance for any quality work afterwards would fly out the window and we’d be struggling to regain rhythm and relaxation for the rest of the ride.

Not so anymore!  We are FINALLY at the stage where I feel we can start working on the canter and not just the walk/trot. 

It’s only taken – oh, about a year….  Wait, nope – a lot longer than that!  Ever since I first started riding Copper I’ve been waiting to get to the stage where we could finally work on his canter!  And that would be over ten years now…  However, since I seriously started to pull apart my riding and try and figure out how my seat/body influenced Copper – that’s been about a year, and now I feel like that’s the point when I really started to ride.

The rest of the time – that’s just been sitting on top of a horse.

I can’t tell you how epic it feels to finally reach this stage I’ve been waiting for.  It’s like sunshine and cotton candy, and all the stars in the night sky wrapped up inside of me, waiting to burst out. 

It took a long time to get here, and I know there are mountains more to conquer, but right now I’m so thrilled that we’ve got so far.  Copper’s not a dressage horse, but we are riding dressage together anyway, and it’s a good thing. 

See ya,

bonita

P.S. – Jane Savoie breaks the canter aid down in the beginning of this video, and really it’s both – inside seat bone/leg AND the outside leg.  I guess in the end it’s really about how you look at it, and what clicks for your head.

Mid-week Ride. It Happened.

Just after I was having a good ol’ pity fest over being a weekend rider, I rode yesterday (Wednesday). There’s no photographic evidence, but I swear it happened! And it was epic. Well, being able to ride was, the ride itself not so much…

Copper is super fresh still; there’s a ton of green spring grass and clover coming up, so he’s all “Weeeeeee! Running!” and I’m all “Gah! Slow down! Can’t we have one ride where we’re not bolting around every two minutes without having to walk the entire time??”

Seriously. He’s a hard horse to ride. You have to work for every stride, every minute you are on his back. Not that he is spooky or silly, it’s more like, if you are not constantly working on releasing his tension or your own tension, you won’t get any softness with him. Not a single bit.

He can be soft, but you have to work *exceptionally* hard for it.

It’s much too easy to disintegrate into a pulling match with him. He is all too ready to tense up if you so much as twitch a hair out of a soft, correct position, and then he takes off, and you tense up, and he tenses up even more…. And there you have it. It’s a war between horse and rider. Nasty.

I try like anything to avoid this, but it still happens occasionally. Like yesterday. We started off ok, had a normal walk warm up and some good walk-trot-walk transitions.

I like to ride without stirrups for the first ten minutes or so, but I am not sure that that was helpful for Copper yesterday. As soon as I picked up my stirrups I noticed he had really stiff shoulders, and a tight back behind his withers.

So I spent the next half an hour trying to get him to release his back while trotting. We did the most awful spiral-in circles; no geometry or even full circling to speak of. We went up, we went down, I tried to post from my hips but couldn’t even get my butt out of the saddle?? I did the head flexion trick, but that only loosened his shoulders for a short while, and not his back, so he was tight again almost straight away.

We even did leg yields successfully! And yes, I was right. He did only need a seat aid, not a leg aid as well. D’oh. But we’re leg yielding at a trot now, yay! 

Too bad the yielding only activated his hindquarters, but still did not loosen his back. Ugh. So frustrating. He can be tense and work through his butt. He is the master at using all different parts of his body while still holding tension and blocking in others. 

His back is a tricky place to release. I’m not even sure how I got it to relax in the end, but something clicked. I did a lot of reaching forwards with the inside rein to allow a place of softness, and I tried dropping my shoulders down and back to release that muscle between my shoulder blades, (under my bra strap). I also blew out through my mouth and concentrated on releasing any tension in my seat.

So like I said, something- I don’t what- clicked. He lifted his back, and suddenly I could post and sit to his trot comfortably!  He was blowing and snorting, and his back was swinging and soft. Best of all, his gait was also rhythmical and cadenced. We did walk-trot transitions and it was still soft and relaxed. 

Finally, I had some quality trotting from him.  I don’t know how we got there, but I’m going to keep trying to do it again and again – without the battling in between!

He’s so tricky to figure out. I just hope I’m actually improving him and myself, and not muddling the both of us up. I miss having lessons.

I suppose I just have to keep on trying to listen to his responses in the meantime. One thing is for sure, he’s not at all shy about letting me know when I have it wrong!

See ya,

bonita

Working On A Standardbred’s Trot

 
I’ve been trying some new things with Copper to hunt down that elusive soft trot that I know he has in there somewhere. I know it because just the other day I actually found it for once!

We were out on the trail loop that goes behind our horse paddocks, and he was buzzing – his energy was so high.  I tried a few short trot ‘sprints’, with little success, and then we came to the part of the trail that drops into a ditch.

Well, it’s more like a gulley, where the feet of two hills meet. It’s not altogether that steep or deep, but it’s fair stretch down and we usually walk it on a bit of angle.

Not this time though! Copper charged down it, and when he reached the bottom, snatched the bit and took off up the other side. I had anticipated this, so I stayed with him and when we reached the top, steadied him down to a medium-fast canter.

I didn’t even bother thinking about pulling him up. So not worth it. He dropped back to a trot himself when we reached a rocky part of the trail, and then I asked him to walk which he did quite willingly.  I guess he needed to blow off steam or something…

At any rate, I got the bright idea of making him do some work to combat all that excess energy!

There’s a nice level piece of ground that our trail goes past that is about 150m x 70m (roughly – it’s a natural stretch, so this is just a guesstimate!) and is relatively stone and grass tussock free; great for doing some schooling out on a trail.

I started with lateral work at a walk.  Leg yields, shoulder-fores, and ended with two/three steps of shoulder-in before we moved onto trot circles. He wanted to canter, so I said, “Sure, you can canter Copper, but I’m going to make you work for it!”.  

We did slow, uphill canter circles for a bit and when he finally figured out that that was HARD and a trot was easier, I got the softest trot from him I have ever felt!

What’s more, he was so round, supple, and through, that he felt like he was doing an actual medium trot worth a score. It was powerful and energetic, but so soft. It’s really hard to describe, but it’s like you’ve tapped into this circle of power, and you’re holding it together between your legs and your hands and letting it flow through your seat, into your back and out again.

I was thrilled!

And then, even better – I found it again.  This second time was the ride directly after a not-so-successful ride where I wanted to take it easy, but he wasn’t having any of it. Small, balanced canter circles was the result of that, and it paid off on the very next ride!

I had done a lot of lateral work – we ‘warmed up’ at a walk for close to half an hour. We went through all of our lateral movements, adding some turns on the forehand for fun, halt transitions, backing up, 20m circle spirals with leg yielding in and out, serpentines from the end of the arena to the top and back again - and we had such a good ride I was all like, “Eh, do I want to stop here? If I ask for a trot I might ruin on the relaxed-ness I’ve just spent 30 minutes working for! But I neeed work on his trot… Ugh.  Here goes nothing!”

I asked him to trot right before the corner so that once he was trotting, the first thing he needed to do was balance himself for the corner. This was reasonably effective to stop him from just taking off willy-nilly.  Next, I kept my seat super light by leaning forwards slightly in a half-two point position.

Then I tried something I read somewhere, opening my hands wide, but keeping my elbows tucked in and steady. That was the final key to the puzzle – lightening my seat allowed him to come through over his back, and opening my hands unlocked his neck and shoulders and allowed him to work fully from back to front.

Yes, his frame improved almost instantly, but at this stage that is a secondary concern for me – I am really only interested in his looseness (suppleness and relaxation) or Losgelassenheit, his “throughlettingness” of the aids, or Durchlässigkeit and his free flowing movement and energy, or Schwung.*

And I had all the beginnings of that.  I had it twice – once with far more energy and impulsion on the trail and the second time with more relaxation and attentiveness in the arena.

It’s been nice to have this breakthrough – I now know that I can actually achieve a decent trot from Copper, and I have a some new keys on how to go about doing that. 

Boy, he’s a tough ride sometimes, but I am learning a lot!

See ya,

bonita

*This page on dressage terms has a more through explanation of these German words.

Training Tip: Loosening the base of the neck

 
Remember when I wrote the Training Tip: Slow him down post?  The basis of that post was to use lateral flexion at the poll to soften the horse and slow him down by asking for concentration on the gait and balance, rather than just speeding around. 

To do that, I would signal for flexion by pulsing/vibrating my inside rein, asking the horse to flex his head in from the poll and bend his nose marginally so that I could just see the eye.  Hold that bend for two to four strides, then pulse/vibrate the outside rein and ask for the same degree of bend to the other side.  This can be done on a twenty meter circle or on the straight.    

This exercise is great for slowing down a fast canter on a 20m circle, but as I found out today it is also great for loosening a horse’s neck muscles.

Val from Memoirs of a Horse Girl writes her take on using in-out head flexion in this post Riding Reflection – The base of the neck.  She doesn’t go into the specifics of asking for the release of the horse’s neck, but she does go into the results saying

“Asking him to release the muscles at the base of the neck allowed him to relax his entire neck and back… When he wanted to release those muscles more, I moved both of my hands slightly forward, toward the bit…

I experimented with transitions and changes of direction, always looking and feeling for the muscles in front of the withers to be soft.  Sometimes I opened the rein quite dramatically to prevent myself from pulling back as much as to encourage him to let the muscles go.  I was focusing on the withers, but the effect was on his self carriage.  I could feel him stepping evenly with both hind legs and becoming lighter in front.  I was concerned that cantering would introduce too much excitement and spoil the magic, but he actually carried the feel into the canter.  He bounded in front of me, lifting his shoulders with each stride.  The best was the last transition. 

We went from canter to a nice trot and then I asked him to walk.  He lifted his withers, making a place for his hind legs, and I felt him step deeply underneath our weight as he shifted gears.  This is so difficult for my horse, and he could not have done this if I had pulled on the reins...” 

I find it so interesting because she describes that feeling of her horse stepping under himself, and the softness in front of the whither.  I remembered how that felt with Copper’s canter – I hadn’t realised that’s what I was getting, but I was!

I also knew in a flash that the in-out flexion technique I was using in canter for Copper would be excessively valuable in walk/trot as well for loosening up Joey’s neck.  A light bulb moment if you like!

So adding on to the benefits of softening a fast gait, we can also achieve softness through the neck, which in turn allows softness through the back and then the horse can engage his hindquarters and lift/use his back.

Training exercises can produce more than one result!  *ding*  Useful to know.

See ya!

bonita