Cob Jockey

I had my first lesson in a month last night.  While I was gone, my trainer rode Connor for an entire week, and then parts of the next two weeks.

Reunited and it feels so good! All photos in this post courtesy of the Pixio.

I could definitely tell a difference in him when I got on.  He was responsive to my leg in ways he wasn't before.  She also had had good success in teaching him to keep his front end elevated and hind end engaged, and even said she got a couple of good canter-walk transitions while I was gone.

Of course, her doing it and her teaching me to do it are two totally different things.

Starting to get a tiny bit more uphill...

Since Megan and Kate's Mary Wanless experience, I've thought a lot about trainer teaching styles and how I can be a better student - to recognize when my trainer is giving me a second toolkit instruction when I really need first toolkit.

With Megan's "Amnesia of Expertise" post from yesterday fresh in my head, when my trainer said something yesterday to the effect of "ride him up through your body into the contact" (second toolkit, at least for me), I replied with "I don't know what you mean by that, what do I need to do with my body to do that?" (Translation: Give me first toolkit plz)


It took her a second to put into words what she would naturally do with her body.  She had me stop while she explained it visually, with her body, and also physically, with my body.

She also picked up my leg and put it where it needed to be AND showed me just how much pressure is the right amount of leg pressure by slipping her hand under my leg and asking me to use it - and we both discovered that's pretty difficult right now due to HOW FAT THIS HORSE IS!  But that's for another post.

Asking me to use my leg the way I normally use it so she can feel how much pressure I'm using and where it's hitting him.

After that, she walked next to me and paid attention to what my body was doing.  That was so much more effective for this type of position overhaul than standing in the middle would've been:

Side note: this rein length feels SO SHORT, but I'm glad I recorded this lesson because that length actually looks great.

It ended up being a really effective lesson, but if I hadn't stopped her and made her give me a first toolkit instruction, it might not have been.  I might have tried to achieve the same thing by pulling, not understanding how to do what she asked me to do.

It's not a condemnation of her teaching style either - there are some students I think she could use second toolkit instructions with here and they'd get it.  I'm not that student.  But recognizing that and asking her to translate what she meant into my language turned the entire lesson around.

You can see his big belly pushing my right leg out here.  Forget the muzzle, he's been drylotted for the past two weeks.