Year gone by - Riding Video 2009

[glenatron]

So a year ago I posted a video of Zorro and I ( which has no lost it's music in an argument between Google and Warner ) was a kind of marker for where we were at the time. I figured the way to make that kind of marker useful is to give it points of comparison so on Saturday I got sleepsy_mouse to take some more of our session.

Last year penella22 told me off for doing myself down when posting about video, but this wasn't a great session - it had rained all morning and someone was a bit grumpy and we didn't feel like we were doing as well as we sometimes do. But then for me horsemanship, like singing in the car, always seems to go best when there is no-one around to witness it. Either way it's probably an honest representation of where we're at right now, if not a showcase for a whole lot of excellence. If I can get everything up to the standards of the best bits here by this time next year, though, I think I'll feel like I'm doing alright.

Comments

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

At the moment the lateral work is just kind of "hey we can do this" - practically I guess my goals for it are to be able to get around gates, get out of the way of traffic and generally be able to go sideways if I need to, but right now it's more of a consequence of the work we've been doing on trying to separate out the feet so that I can pick up a foot with each hand and a foot with each leg if I need to. Being able to do that opens up a lot of doors in terms of other stuff one might choose to do. Getting control of the hindfeet in that way should also give a path towards the more engaged work that we were failing at so much during the summer's clinics. We've got a pretty good communication in some respects now, but that engagement thing is just a whole new vocabulary and we're right back on the ABCs where that is concerned.

I guess the other way we use some lateral work ( but not really the sidepass stuff there ) is to rebalance when someone is falling into the circle by just picking back out onto the circle I wanted to ride, rather than the circle that he wanted to be ridden on.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Cool beans. What I think I'm seeing is maybe halfway applicable, then. For the strictly-practical stuff, not so much, but maybe yes if you are looking for engagement and such down the road. So here goes, and you can (as always, of course!) do with it what you like.

What I was wondering about is that--I'm not sure what terminology you'd use for it, exactly? Whether what you call a fore- or hindquarter yield is meant to be different than what I call a turn on the haunches or forehand. So maybe it's just that, if so.

But what I notice is that you may not be getting quite as much biomechanical benefit out of the lateral work as you might. There'll be a good step and then he kind of loses his balance and the crossover and carry behind--he'll start to rush around the turn instead of stepping deliberately and/or he'll go crooked through his shoulder and neck and just be walking straight ahead behind.

Which, y'know, is not necessarily a problem if the practical goal is "flip ends here so I can get this gate"! And certainly there's a time and place for just teaching the beastie that he can and should move his body and/or a part of it in a given direction on request without worrying too much about exactly how he does it. And I suspect the work you've mentioned on learning to do more (and teaching Zorro to respond more) to your leg will make a pretty dramatic change in all of this as it progresses.

But to get the suppling and engaging benefits of the lateral work, I wonder if it might not help if you were to occasionally slow down a notch and act a little more deliberately? Really look for that one. good. step at a time? Obviously going too slowly and carefully has its own pitfalls...! But speed can be the enemy in this kind of work if you're not real careful--it can be a way for the horse to avoid engaging. So something to watch, anyway.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with what you're saying here.

That's a pretty good assessment of how we're working most of the time actually- it's really important for the whole "control of the feet" idea because you need to get that one foot and only that one foot which means most of the work we're doing in this direction is things like one-step-at-a-time turn on the forehand types of thing. The actual sideways is more something I found when I was experimenting with working on the rein and the feet and found that door was starting to open quite nicely.

In this case I thought that the one-step-at-a-time stuff ( which there is some of on the original video ) would probably send anyone watching the video off to sleep fairly quickly so it got edited - on purpose, unlike the cantering bit :)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

In this case I thought that the one-step-at-a-time stuff ( which there is some of on the original video ) would probably send anyone watching the video off to sleep fairly quickly so it got edited - on purpose, unlike the cantering bit :)

Ha! There is that. :-p