Balanced rising trot - loose rein, showing horses response

Rising trot, chest collapsed, knees and heels drawn up, hands flying up - loose rein showing horses response

Rising trot, body out of balance backwards, hands and elbows pulled backwards (putting the handbrake on), coming down hard on horses back - loose rein showing horses response

Rider balanced side to side

Good body position (but hands being pulled forward by horse)

THANK YOU TO ALL OF MY MODELS - WELL DONE!

Some thoughts on riding - are there better ways to do it than we currently realize?

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Communicating with your horse. It’s one of the most challenging aspects of riding – yet it’s a topic most commonly treated as a matter of rules and mechanics. We’ve all heard it……”keep your hands still…….. KEEP YOUR HANDS STILL!!”…….. as though it is every bit as simple as putting your hands at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock on a steering wheel. Of course a steering wheel doesn’t move around a lot, whereas a horse’s head, neck and body certainly do!

Most riders (and horses) wind up stressed, confused and jammed, because the instruction is given to correct a secondary problem without taking into account the cause of that secondary problem.

The solution starts (as with most problems) by going back to basics – and the most basic of basics is position. It’s remained pretty constant for hundreds of years. Most riders can easily tell you about the theory of position but, even as they say the words, most of them totally fail to demonstrate correct position. Correct position is quite simply about being balanced and secure on an extremely mobile, bouncy and often unbalanced partner. ‘Balanced’ means balanced over the base of your feet – if you can’t stay balanced while trialing a position on the ground , it’s certainly not going to improve when you’re mounted. When position starts to be correct, hands and a whole lot of other problems tend to correct themselves.

The most efficient way for the rider to maintain balance and security is by being in a state of relaxed readiness, focused and aware of your ‘partner’ so that you can become a part of their movement, not a tense and sometimes unwilling passenger. There are two main problems here for most people. The first is that our legs are not quite ideally shaped to fit around a horse – this problem can be solved with exercises/stretches and a lot of time riding. The second problem lies in our mind. Instead of trying to mould around the horse, we try to grip. Instead of allowing the horse to move us, we try to imitate the horse’s movements which means we’re never quite synchronized.

Most of the time, trying too hard is the major culprit. At all paces, our thighs and upper calves should mould softly to the horses sides, ready to give instructions or corrections when required, but otherwise doing their best to remain as invisible as a second skin. At the walk, our pelvis and body will find themselves walking (without our legs walking) quite easily. The same theory applies at the trot – except that we notice the bounce in the trot a lot more than we do when it’s our own legs doing the running. Canter’s a bit different. We don’t usually canter on our own legs although it’s quite possible (if we do, we must be careful to keep changing our ‘leading’ leg). Using a hula- hoop mimics the movement fairly well, as well as telling us which direction we move better in and emphasizing the different hip position in canter.

If we can calm ourselves and allow ourselves to bounce up and down with the horse instead of thumping up and down on top of the horse everyone will be pleasantly surprised. The bounce is going to happen regardless (unless your horse is totally lacking in activity) so you might as well learn to love it! It usually helps to breath in time with the pace – otherwise you may just forget to breathe at all. Learning to ‘follow’ the horse requires a great deal of trust and confidence from the rider as it’s alien territory to most of us. You may find afterwards that some of your muscles are stiff from being allowed to move so much, but this is only a temporary downside and has the upside that we become more supple, and we are no longer blocking the horse’s movement.

Once you have learned to focus and follow the horse’s body unreservedly, then you will be in a position to feel what is happening underneath you. This is extremely important, because if you can’t feel what is happening you can’t fix it! The next step is to consciously influence what the horse does by using our bodies appropriately. ie Using our ‘feel’ to correct any problems or make new requests – you will be surprised how easy this becomes once you have a correct position and an awareness of both of your bodies.

In the process of finding a balanced, following state of quiet readiness we will discover that our legs, hands, head and neck stay quieter as they’re no longer trying to compensate for all of our small losses of balance in the course of a ride. Quiet readiness means that we shouldn’t be tense and we shouldn’t actively anticipate or the horse will respond accordingly. In reality, the ideal state is rarely reached for most of us, but it shouldn’t stop us from trying because even at lower levels of achievement, the results are quite magical.

Now that we’ve got all that relaxation and feel happening, we need to expand it and adapt it so that we can create a ‘language’ which becomes the ultimate in a subtle and effective control system.