Cob Jockey

I posted this on October 17:

This is now:


And - almost every ride has been that even for about six weeks now, that's not an outlier.

I almost posted this as a WW, but I felt like the reason for this change needed to be shared.  This is more than just knowing I wasn't turning left and turning left more often after I got the Equisense.  This was figuring out why being on the left rein felt uncomfortable and being on the right rein felt comfortable.

August of 2015 - the left rein has always been my nemesis.

In December, my trainer helped me identify that my leg position when on the left and right rein didn't really change.  All this time I've been pointing fingers at my torso, my hips, my seat, my hands, but I never thought about my legs.  I thought those were "fine".

Ok, we're digging into my "Not Blogworthy" folder for some truly embarrassing never-before-posted outtakes now.  This is "left bend", July 2017.

But in reality, my left leg was always behind the girth and my right was always at the girth - regardless of direction.  And my right leg was almost never on the horse because I was never sitting on the right seatbone.  My right leg just floats out in space - so when I did use my left leg, he just escaped out the right.

He should be in left bend here, we just turned left at the judge and are about to take the diagonal at H.  I am so far off to the right and my left leg is so far back, there's no bend at all. July 2017

So being on the left rein was uncomfortable. I could not get left bend or engage the left hind, and because I couldn't get the bend or left hind engagement I felt like I needed to pull on the inside rein more.

Dat completely ineffective left leg.  No wonder this horse has never bent left for me.

One thing that's important for me to realize: I'm going to be fixing the repercussions of this for a long time, and I'm patient with him on this, because I created it. 

Oh man, Karen managed to capture everything that was wrong with me on the left rein in one picture!  I need to print this out and hang it in my locker at the barn.

I can feel now that the left hind is the weaker leg in both directions.  It becomes less hard with each ride to remember my "new" leg position - mainly because I default to "Am I sitting correctly?" before anything else when I lose the bend.  But for the first time, both directions feel equally "easy", and that's being confirmed by the Equisense, and that's an AWESOME feeling.

Horse without rider: perfectly capable of all this stuff.

I rode three days in a row last weekend and Monday before leaving for another work trip...story of my life this year!

Saturday was supposed to be a nice relaxing hack in the hay field, but it turned into a full on schooling ride when homeslice started jigging, prancing and then took off with me.  I know he was having fun, but dude, all you had to do was walk around on a lovely fall day!  Instead he got put to work.


On Sunday, we jumped!  Just a tiny crossrail in my Dressage saddle, but he definitely took me to the fence.  Jumping for fun and variety is something I want to revisit this winter.  That CWD has been sitting in the tack room for far too long.

I miss you.

On Sunday and Monday both, I really honed in on something my trainer brought up in last week's lesson: What makes me not want to go left on him?  How am I sitting that I'm giving him an avenue to drift to the outside in both directions but in very different ways?  And why are left circles so ineffective for developing bend with me and not my trainer?

Look at this.  LOOK AT THIS!  Progress.

Turns out, I'm pretty sure it's because my pelvis and torso positioning in the saddle isn't changing when I go from right to left.  I'm not going to rehash that here, because I feel like I've re-learned that once a year for the past three years, but yeah...slow learner.  Who knew, if I turn, he turns...

Thanks for putting up with me for six years this week, little buddy.  Maybe I'll learn to ride someday!

Haven't had time to go through this video yet, but just to punctuate what I talked about in my last post, here's a screenshot from last night's ride (my first lesson with my regular trainer in...a long time):






Amazing what a difference not giving up on the inside hind and remembering to keep your reins short enough makes.

Whew.

Three straight weeks of work travel is over!  And I'm back where I belong.

On this fellow!

After spending last Saturday watching JenJ kill it on Taran at USDF Finals (You better blog about that!!!!!!!!), I came home motivated to get back in the saddle and work on some concepts JenJ and I discussed, as well as continue working on the concepts from my last Nancy lesson.

Tired, shaggy, sweaty, but also foamy!

He's really getting the message about bend and engaging the inside hind on the right rein, but I've noticed on the left he pushes out through his outside shoulder when I ask him to move the left hind underneath him.  Like, he's bent, overbent, with his shoulder leading and traveling to the outside, but his hind leg doesn't move at all.  It's like his hindquarters are stuck.

"...I wouldn't do that!"

It's not like me to insist on something like that normally, I'm not confident enough in what I feel to pick a battle like that, but I was pretty sure I was right about that one.  I trotted him left on a circle, with him very worried and not getting the message, asking asking asking, until he finally gave me the right answer.

I hesitate to call it a breakthrough, but it was good for us: I learned to be firm with him, he learned what I was asking for, he learned things can get a little scary (for him) and things will turn out okay, he learned to respect me. 

Blanket mane

Sometimes you just have to have a discussion, and that was a particularly productive one.  Our next ride after that (last night) proved he slept on it and really retained it, even if it took a bit of reminding in the beginning.  And he's got some anxiety when I use my left leg.  Gotta get over that sometime though, as Nancy said, he needs a bit of healthy respect for my aids.

It's good to be back.

One of the tenets about my new position is letting go of the tension I normally harbor in my legs and letting myself sit on the horse and follow his position with my hips.  This has led to feels I've never felt before, and a really cool lesson Thursday night.

A very cool and tiring lesson.  He let the crossties hold his head up during his bath afterward.

My lesson last night pretty much definitively proved that my loose left shoulder has been holding us back.  It was so refreshing to come out, and in my warmup, get him to the place he needed to be for us to do real work.

Also I got out super early and clipped and detangled him.  It's just so nice spending time at the barn in the summer.

My trainer said, "So what was so great about Tuesday's ride?" I told her what I figured out, and she chuckled and said, "So...exactly what I've been telling you for years?"  After six years, she and I have that kind of relationship where she can honestly (and with a smile on her face) tell me something like that, but it's totally true.  I'm a slow learner.  I have learned this before.  It didn't stick.  It will now.

I mean, if we're being honest, I really just figured out the inside leg to the outside rein for probably the 17th time on this blog. Thank goodness for blogging, so I can go back and reference things like the lesson with T.

Freshly detangled.

We spent most of the lesson spiraling in and out on the right.  She noted that my shoulder made a huge difference in the overall picture of me, and that it also solved my wayward left hand problem.  For my part, it's very easy to be aware of now: if he went from going really well to falling apart, 100% of the time (at least last night) I had given that shoulder forward.

He's aaaaalmost done shedding.

When we switched to the left, it was clear things weren't quite so figured out.  When I asked him to soften and follow the left rein, my trainer noted that his whole body went right.  So on a left circle, we counterbent him, and asked him to just follow where his nose went.

It's a work in progress - but we're making progress.

In another rider's JLC ride, he said something that was very evident in my lesson on Thursday.  He said when you're trying to make a big change in the way the horse is used to going, they will actively resist you because they're protecting themselves, because you're asking them to change the only way they know how to do something.  You'll ask correctly, and they'll give you all the wrong answers at first and flat out tell you 'Not possible!', and that's okay, don't think you're asking wrong, you're not.  You just have to be persistent and eventually they will see that the way you're asking them to move is more comfortable for them, and they'll do it right.

That happened, word for word, in Thursday's lesson.

I hadn't ridden since Sunday thanks to a business trip to Grand Rapids, and Connor did not come out with his Dressage hat on.  We worked through that, and then worked on the left bend issue.

The left bend has never been good for us.  Even from the ground to a casual observer, it's visually apparent that he just clicks into place on the right, but the left sucks.  Check it out:

Left, uh, no bend.

But to the right...

Not the best example of bend, but take my word for it: magic happens to the right, and to the right only.

My trainer had me take my outside (right) leg waaaaay back to ask his croup to stay in.  It felt like I was going to touch his hip with my ankle (though I'm sure I wasn't even close).

And this kicked off a ten minute argument in which I would get the croup, then he'd pile onto the inside shoulder and almost counterbend, then I'd get the shoulder and the croup would swing to the outside.  I pointed this out to my trainer and asked WTF?  She said he was telling me that he can either give me the croup or the shoulder, but not both. (Both being required to bend left)  He did not know his body could bend that way.

(He also, interestingly, was very rateable speed-wise to the right, but would go as fast as he could to the left while we were doing this.  If that isn't an evasion, I don't know what is.)

So we just...slogged through it.  Like JLC said, I kept asking, he kept saying "MY BODY DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT, LADY!" and then...I got both.  And we got the most left bend I think we've ever gotten, and the whole rest of the lesson I got it and I didn't even have to ask that hard for it.

It was like he realized what I was asking was 1) possible and 2) easier than he thought, and he said, "Okay!"

At the end of the lesson, we did some legitimately legitimate walk half passes, better than we've ever gotten, because I had croup control.  It also helped when, with every stride, she called out "croup, shoulder in, croup, shoulder in."  It helped my timing with the aids a lot.

I'm looking forward to exploring this more, and maybe, having the same feel to the right that I do to the left for once.

Now that I've shared a couple of good rides, it's time to break down why those rides have been so good,  what has changed positionally and what it has done for Connor and I.  Biomechanics nuts, this one is for you.


My trainer noted two things to the right:
1. He tips me to the left and keeps me there, and I need to keep my right seatbone "glued" to the saddle.
2. His canter moves laterally to the outside with every stride to the right.

And to the left:
1. He gets heavy in the right (outside) rein, and the solution for that is more right leg.
2. He really needs support from the outside leg in that direction to encourage him to bring the outside of his body around the inside.

So I started thinking about this.  When she corrected my right seatbone thing, it felt like my crotch was over the pommel to the right.  It wasn't, and it actually made it easier to keep the top of my outside thigh against the saddle and my outside leg on him.  Also, that's the only position in which I can get him to half pass - makes sense now why the left was so much easier than the right half pass right from the beginning. (I wasn't sitting on the right side).

August 2014 trainer ride video still.

In that position, I could really put him together by half halting in the outside rein, then imagining that I was riding the outside seatbone to the inside ear.  That's position and line of thought is where that medium trot came from.  I seriously felt the leg-to-hand cycle of energy.

Then I thought about that concept going to the left, where I have a harder time putting him together.  That's how I realized that my entire pelvis is still in right bend positioning when going to the left, even when my torso is in left bend positioning, which explains why I hate being on the left rein and find it uncomfortable and blame it on Connor's inability to bend.  Newsflash: he's doing the best he can at bending left when my reins say 'bend left' but my seat and legs say 'bend right'.

Horse doesn't have a problem bending left.  I have a problem preventing him from bending left.

I have started focusing on that feeling I get on the right when I go to the left, of the top of my outside thigh touching the saddle, and really making sure my pelvis and torso are aligned together in asking for left bend.  Or as my trainer says "make sure the saddle is facing in the direction you are going."  Often, mine is not, but that's changing now.

I am so happy to report that last night's lesson was the best Dressage ride I've had since probably August!

We got dem Dressage skillz (again).

Crooked.

REALLY piling on the right, and me doing all the wrong things.

The whole time my trainer was gone, I did what felt like productive floundering.  I figured out a couple of things about myself, such as the left shoulder thing, and learning that my shoulders are always turned to the right over my hips.  But Connor got less sharp with every ride and was never on my aids while she was gone.

Muggin' for cookies.  Treats = insta-birdie.

But she's back, and she took us from blah to better-than-it's-been-in-a-month amazing in 45 minutes.  I caught myself thinking about how different that ride was from all the rides I had while she was gone.  I'm the same person, riding the same horse, but when she teaches me, we may as well be someone else.  Magic.  This is why I pay her, right?

(It's gonna get real word-vomity in here, but I kept this blog after college because I have a hard time remembering what my trainer says after a lesson, and it helps me to write it down later.)

We started out with leg yields, but seamlessly flowed into...speed control? work when she saw we needed it. He was running through my aids at the leg yield, and I was not riding enough from my core to stop it.  It was genuinely frustrating, and I was down on myself.  She had me try and pick up the trot and think about the first step being a half halt, because she said his shoulders get running away from him and from me in the first step, and if we can package the first step and tell the shoulders to wait for the hindquarters, I'll have the control I would otherwise lose.

It worked exactly how she said it would, so we mixed that in with using just my core to make him almost walk, and when I felt that the very next millisecond he would walk, to move him back up into trot again.  She also had me think up up up in my core when I asked for the trot.  He started to come onto my aids in this exercise.

Let's break this up with a blurry leaning wash rack picture.

The last half of the lesson was the real magic.  We worked on a 20m circle at the trot, to the pesky left direction. She had me do a turn on the forehand, and then think turn on the forehand as I got going.  She pointed out that I often feel like I have to carry my reins slightly to the outside because he is not in my outside rein or listening to my inside leg, and when I do use one aid or the other, he bowls through the opposing aid.  My reins should be slightly to the inside, with him filling the outside rein,

She said "Every time he makes you feel like you have to carry your reins to the outside, what you really need is a turn on the forehand.  You don't have to come down to the walk to do one, but think turn on the forehand in the trot."  It's "get him on your aids" and "get him between you inside leg and outside rein" told in a way that she knows will click in my brain.  There is a lot to be said for a trainer getting to know you over the years.

That, combined with me being firm in the outside rein and REALLY asking for some jaw softness with the inside rein gave me my first true left bend in months.  I firmly asked for what I wanted, and it felt like I was pulling his jaw around until it softened, but as one of my favorite people said (outside of a teaching setting!) "sometimes it's just telling people to pull his head to the left and kick him".  That is exactly what I needed to do, once or twice, until he softened around both my leg and hand, and then he was really truly bending and really truly on my aids.

You made it!  Here's a happy Husky in what's hopefully the last snowfall of the winter.