Loving the warmer weather!!! Definitely creates more activity at the barn as people become much braver! Haha….but I dont think anyone can deny there were a few more smiles with the dreary clouds finally stepping aside for the first bit of sunshine in a LOOOONG time! Vitamin D!!!! Anyhow, giving a lesson today, I had two ladies ride together….both of them with the same issue but different root problems….each tends to fall in the pelvis more to one side than the other….one because of a scholiosis issue that we need to compensate for and the other because of an overdeveloped side from always taking a particular stance for kicking after years of karate and earning a black belt! So, the one with the crooked back has been working more on her horse and learning how to help him get more drive by getting him better aligned. But today we stepped up a notch and now her body was on the chopping block! haha…because of the position of her pelvis coming out of her spine, her right hip sat more forward. So when she tracked left, it created the issue of swinging his hips to the outside and making him set on his left(inside) rein. This made a problem for turning pretty turns and circles as well as a discabobulated (butchered that Im sure) canter of which he chased himself and broke a lot with a lot of busy head action. This is because sitting too far into her right side made the scissor affect in her pelvis the opposite of what a left tracking circle should be. So her right(outside) leg and pelvis were forward and her inside leg and pelvis were back making her inside seat bone a menace to his left side back muscles…causing him to swing his hips to the outside to avoid the pressure and then his inside shoulder had to offset half the body being to the outside of center line. I told her to ride with her right seat bone toward the center of the saddle and/or toward me (in the center of the circle at the time) as that would reposition her pelvis and switch the scissor to the correct position. This helped straighten his ribcage as she also added a little more outside rein to realign his ribcage and support his outside body and just like that she barely asked to canter and he just departed like nothing! The other woman who is overdeveloped on the right side of her body tends to fall left in the saddle and the horse drifts left to get underneath her weight which creates steering and collection issues…but what happens, and i see this a lot, is when a steering issue comes into play, a person usually grabs harder at the wrong rein….in this case she was falling left and he was drifting left (not wanting to turn right) and she pulled harder on the right rein as a natural response cuz shes falling left…..in this situation, it wasnt a horse resistance issue, it was an alignment issue of both horse and rider making it very difficult to come around the corner. So I told her, whichever side your pelvis is dropping, pull that rein…….you see, when your hip is dropping or your saddle is falling to one side, there is a base of support not underneath that particular side. So you pull that shoulder base back underneath you, for this particular woman I had to have her think of counter flexing her horse for two steps and then straighten as that made her use her correct rein to fix the issue. As soon as she did that, the horses ribcage realigned and he relaxed and came right around. Lack of drive and tension are the two biggest enemies to getting a horse to give what you need him/or her to give….a correct response. Lack of drive is pretty self explanatory, but tension….what defines tension in a horses body besides fear??? Imbalance (most common). Imbalance comes from a horse being more leftie than righty. not equally muscled from one side to the other. The average horse is not ambidextrous….it is either a leftie or a righty….your job as you train your horse is to develop that lesser side to the same ability of suppleness and strength as the other side. Unfortunately, more people try to break down the stiff side which will create much more fight and resistance and TENSION in the horse than doing a positive approach which is build up the weaker side! As you build up and develop the weaker side, the compensations that create tension points (on the stiff side) will lessen and you will have a more relaxed, quieter, willing, slower horse naturally. There is more than one way to get a horse trained, but the end doesnt always justify the means. In other words, if theres a more anatomically friendly way to do the same thing, why wouldnt you?? Just thinking outside the box...….
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 04:33:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015