Sunday's lesson ended up being a private - something I haven't had in a long time. My instructor put me on a youngster who I have ridden once before, outside, who kept plunging into the forest during my lesson (ah, but that's another story). We worked on getting his head down and on the bit. My instructor has been training him to do this, which basically means he'll do it for her, but he wont automatically do it. Probably the perfect lesson horse for me to learn it on.
We started off with warming up and getting a nice forward trot. We kept to a 20m circle to work on this. I made sure my reins had even pressure and then he was bending properly around my leg and I was keeping him from falling in. The inside rein was only very lightly used to keep him properly looking where he was going.
For the outside rein, it was all about half-halts. Squeezing and releasing my grip. If I was doing everything I was supposed to, his head would go down for a few glorious strides. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at doing all of this at once and usually he'd start to spiral into the circle and all would be lost, or I'll try to widen the circle and his head would pop up. But at least I know what it feels like to do it correctly!
We also worked on leg yielding right, facing the wall. Since he's young, we didn't make him deal with my struggles for too long before letting him take a break and walk it out. I learned that I was doing it the lazy way before, just pushing the horse over with my leg, rather than make sure I can see his left eyelashes and shifting my weight in my left seat bone. The most important thing for him to understand me, though, was to look where we are going, which is so obvious, but when your instructor is point out things to you, it's kind of the last thing on your mind.
Overall, we squeezed a lot into a half-hour lesson. I even popped him over a cross rail and he was super smooth. My two point is a little more sturdy as I've been thinking of bring my seat up and back rather than just out of the saddle and collapsing forward.
We started off with warming up and getting a nice forward trot. We kept to a 20m circle to work on this. I made sure my reins had even pressure and then he was bending properly around my leg and I was keeping him from falling in. The inside rein was only very lightly used to keep him properly looking where he was going.
For the outside rein, it was all about half-halts. Squeezing and releasing my grip. If I was doing everything I was supposed to, his head would go down for a few glorious strides. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at doing all of this at once and usually he'd start to spiral into the circle and all would be lost, or I'll try to widen the circle and his head would pop up. But at least I know what it feels like to do it correctly!
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| Oops...my hands aren't very thoughtful yet... |
We also worked on leg yielding right, facing the wall. Since he's young, we didn't make him deal with my struggles for too long before letting him take a break and walk it out. I learned that I was doing it the lazy way before, just pushing the horse over with my leg, rather than make sure I can see his left eyelashes and shifting my weight in my left seat bone. The most important thing for him to understand me, though, was to look where we are going, which is so obvious, but when your instructor is point out things to you, it's kind of the last thing on your mind.
Overall, we squeezed a lot into a half-hour lesson. I even popped him over a cross rail and he was super smooth. My two point is a little more sturdy as I've been thinking of bring my seat up and back rather than just out of the saddle and collapsing forward.
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