Day 3

[glenatron]

We got some things done today.


For the local group this was the end of their clinic, so a big part of the day's goal was consolidating the last few days work. For me I had my final thought from yesterday that I need to put more life into the horse and then use less to direct it.

As we talked around a few points that different people had run into Steve talked a bit about how hard it is to break out of our comfort zones by getting effective. This is one way we tend to get stuck, particularly as when we are ineffective, we are basically teaching our horse the opposite of what we want them to know. Every time you pick up the rein and don't get the outcome you want, you're teaching the horse to ignore the rein.

We talked a bit about timing, which has been a central theme from the last few days and Steve asked for suggestions about examples of timing. These are what the group came up with:

• Getting in time with the feet.
• Release - this is perhaps the single most important thing.
• Asking at the right time - if you ask your horse for something that they can't offer you, you're more likely to get into trouble. That judgement is a type of timing as well.
• Cadence.

We began our work with the horses by using a leg rope to feel the feet. This is a great exercise for us to understand exactly when the feet are doing what they do. You put a rope or string around the hind leg and then keep the rope level by moving your hand in time with the leg - to start with you just use it to follow the movement of the leg so you can judge exactly where the hind foot is and make sure you are judging your timing correctly. I'm sure I have talked about this before, but a horse can only respond to a request for their feet to change direction just before the foot leaves the ground- once it is in the air you can't redirect it and while it is weighted you can't redirect it, so if you want truly subtle aids you need to be in time with the feet and only ask at the time the horse can respond.

One of the horses was definitely not alright with having a rope around her leg, so Steve spent a while working on that with her.

Mare has a panicky moment when the rope goes over her hindquarters. This is the first stage Steve uses in getting the horse ready to handle having a rope around her leg- if she can't tolerate this, she definitely won't handle the rope around her leg.

It took quite a while for her to settle to this - she got very concerned and Steve just kept the rope there and kept the lead fairly short so she was having to turn her hindquarters around away from him rather than allowing her to get straight, when she might leave, or get her hindquarters in, whereupon he would quite possibly get kicked.

Some people might question why you would want to put a horse through that much stress in this type of situation - I know some people get very worried about the use of ropes around horses in this type of work in general. Those people probably also have horses that would tear themselves to shreds if they ever got a foot caught in a wire fence. We all get to decide what risks we are confident to take with our horses. I agree with Steve that it's better for a horse to feel a bit braver about these things because I don't want to leave a lot of fear in a horse I'm riding.


A few minutes later she's pretty much alright with it.

This stuff was quite useful for me to work on with Oscar- he's an old hand at all this kind of nonsense, so I could get used to the feeling of moving with the rope on his foot from both sides. Then we got on and rode using a long string just looped around his leg. As well as using it for feeling the timing of the stride, I was able to influence his movement a little, ask him to initiate moving off from the foot I had on the string.

We moved from there to riding with a stick. We had reins, still, but we were carrying a stick and using it instead of the rein to ask for steering, effectively using it in the same way you might use a neck rein, to back up body cues and to push the horse around, rubbing on the neck to ask and then waving it in their sight to push if they weren't moving off the ask on the neck. This is actually a great exercise- again it keeps you from pulling on the rein as a rider and gets you thinking about your body cues a lot more.

In the afternoon a lot of the clinic attendees were heading home, so those of us remaining decamped to the school and spent a while practicing our roping. Oscar liked being a roping horse because he just had to stand there and not do much. His main interaction with me during this, apart from being a rock-steady base, was to wait until I had the perfect loop and the best swing I managed and then flick his tail into the loop so it collapsed and tangled us up. Then he wobbled his floppy bottom lip and looked back at me dolefully.

Once we had finished throwing ropes over barrels and catching each other's horses, Steve fetched over some polocrosse racquets ( if racquets they are ) and got us using those. After a bit of fumbling I managed to pick up the ball and then we played a little and if the goal was to fumble and drop the ball left right and centre, then fail to pick it up, I think we played a pretty amazing game.

We moved on to playing the "protect the herd" game, where one rider keeps the other out of a circle of barrels and they try to get in. The main goal is to get faster changes of direction and to get the horse setting off briskly after them.

Elaine tries to protect the herd, Steve gets ahead. Shortly afterwards I tried to protect the herd from her and abjectly failed because Oscar's accelerator wasn't working so great.


Josh protects the herd from Emma. Those horses are the best of friends when they're not playing this game.

"Well Ben," asked Steve, "what would it take for Oscar to go from back-up to a decent canter?"
"What would it take for him to go from trot to a decent canter?" I said.

Steve suggested I take him around and then ask him to really go, so I backed my leg hard with the mecate and we started loping a little. I got more insistent and we got a little more. We came to a halt beside the group and Steve said he was going to take his horse around and we needed to keep up, and away he Zoomed with us in lukewarm pursuit.

Actually we did alright in terms of speed, but we weren't faster, so Steve did get a good lead up to start with. Certainly Oscar was really moving out in a way that was quite different from anything he had offered previously by the time we were done. In fact it was fairly different from anything else I have ridden previously - fast and very exhilarating. Once we had that forward motion going we were able to make some changes of direction around the arena so Oscar showed me how it feels to ride through some lead changes, which was another new experience for me.

Next up we worked on some rollbacks, backing into a quarter turn, then pushing off so that the turn completes with a strike off into a brisk pace. It took a while for me to get the change of balance I needed to use to get from "back and round" to "go!" Then I had to catch Oscar when he was letting his ribs drop behind the turn, just bumping him really firmly with my leg when he was doing it until he would follow my softer leg cue. After a while we got some nice rollbacks into a good canter- not perfect but pretty good considering how disorganised my balance was being.

With that covered, we finished the evening with a gentle trail ride around through the bush in the evening light. I got to see my first wild Kangaroos! It's a very beautiful place to be able to ride. Apparently Oscar can be a bit excitable on trail rides, but today he was really calm, so maybe going through his paces a little had helped him be calm.

All in all I would say it was an excellent day and I got a lot of things done that I needed to do, and really enjoyed it. My stomach muscles do feel a little as though I've spent half of the day doing sit-ups, though. I think I'll really know about that tomorrow.

Comments

[herecirm.livejournal.com]

'...but a horse can only respond to a request for their feet to change direction just before the foot leaves the ground'. Yes! As you attempted to tell me, repeatedly, while I was riding a wandering cob. "WHY IS ZORRO BALANCING ON THIS NARROW RIDGE. WHHYYYY."

Also, the "everything's all right now" photo of the Mare Who Didn't Like Ropes is so damn cute.

Oscar is a very helpful roping horse. :)

Sounds like such an awesome day ... especially with the trail ride at the end. Gorgeous. I'm liking the dust clouds in the action shots, too; they make for very dramatic pictures.

Oh, also - what does: 'he was letting his ribs drop behind the turn' mean? How do you know if a horse is doing that?

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

So I was asking for a turn and he was bending to follow the rein but not picking up his shoulders and ribs to follow it around so the turn itself worked out a little lacklustre. By bumping on his ribs as he started following the rein cue he would pick his shoulders and body up and bring them around so the turn immediately got a lot sharper and more on the aids.

Hopefully I'll be able to show you how it is supposed to feel next time you visit.

Wish I had had my camera with me when we rode out but it had been on my saddle horn and fell off when I was doing some stuff previously so I had temporarily lost it.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

One good way to get the feel of rollbacks is to have someone else cue them for you in a round pen. Just sayin'. (grin).

Galloping is good and fun stuff. Especially on a horse who plans a sliding stop on you.

Seriously, riding the rollback comfortably does take a lot of practice for both horse and rider. Mocha gets so excited and I get sufficiently discombobulated sometimes that we end up doing bastard half-pirouettes instead of rollbacks. OTOH, G is always willing to provide coaching (evil grin). I found that it's one of those moves where the rider needs to have the ability to move and rotate hips laterally while keeping the upper body stable. For me, leading into the rollback with my shoulder and then head made the twisting action smooth. Ideally, the horse's shoulder follows my shoulder, barrel my core, hips, my hips. Mileage may vary for others, that's just how I do it on a relatively small horse. I could see needing to provide more balance and support to keep a larger horse collected and round.

Glad to read you're getting into the fun stuff, like changes--flying, I assume? Rollbacks are definitely a cool tool to have for both horse and rider, because if you don't have certain foundational basics it doesn't come together right. And schooling to that point is a lot of fun.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

What Steve pointed out was that I needed to put my weight back onto the foot I wanted Oscar to be turning around for the initial turn then changing to much more of a "go!" position as we moved to strike off. And also to be keeping the life in his body and getting my leg cues right and everything else. And not thinking too much about it...

It's pretty handy to have a horse like Oscar to ride, no question- a lot of the same basic things I need to work on with Zorro but with a whole lot more training available once I can access it.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Let's see. Thinking through the process. You're always turning away from the lead you were on when you were stopping, so yes, you need to weight that inside foot or you'll go shooting off as the horse turns (btdt, first time G did instructor-cued rollbacks with me it was on a snorty Arab without warning because he was annoyed that neither of us were paying attention. The only way I managed to stay on through the first two was by hooking the saddle horn with an elbow, and pulling mane. Laughing my head off. While beginner-level college students watched, in shock. Much better now!).

In schooling Mocha for more precise rollbacks (for reiner stuff), I'll often break it down slowly. It's always a rollback to the outside, so I'll also mix it up with spins to the inside to get her more alert and ready to go. We'll stop. Pause, because if you rush through it early on, you get the bastard pirouette. Outside leg, cluck, horse should strike off in correct lead after a quarter turn (thus sayeth G, the judge and trainer of judges). Like I said, lead with your inside shoulder, which will help with the weighting the foot you want the horse to turn around. Scoop with your seat (effective way of "bringing the life up," which is a term that I often find frustratingly vague but I understand why it gets used, because otherwise some people will be far too strong and less subtle with their cues) to keep the horse's momentum going, don't get in the horse's way (if you don't scoop, you risk getting left behind and blocking the momentum).

Big Emmy at our barn does the most elegant rollbacks. G's wife will walk her ten steps, roll her back, canter ten steps, stop, walk on for ten steps, roll back, and Emmy gets very elegant and round. She's a big and elegant Appendix QH, royally bred from racing and Western Pleasure bloodlines, has impulsion that would make a dressagista drool, and has passed her movement down to her babies. Very round, very powerful, yet light.

Rollbacks can also be a useful tool for a horse being difficult about picking up a particular lead. For that purpose it's good to make sure the horse already knows how to rollback on cue in a round pen. Some people would use a flag for this, others don't (depends on how effective you are in using body language without a flag or whip. I use a whip or my body, others would use a flag). Once the horse knows how to rollback on cue in a round pen, get a solid rollback rider up, have the ground person (with warning), cue the horse into rollbacks in the round pen. The rider shouldn't touch the reins except to reinforce the turning cue, this is usually for a horse that needs to have its head free to figure out balance. That's why you need a solid rider, someone who can get out of the horse's way and not impair the balance.

We had to do that with Mocha. I knew I was in for it when the entire barn community marched out to the round pen during a scheduled lesson (back when I was lessoning her regularly) and G invited me in. Training session for all of us. And it worked. She was deadly fast on the stronger lead (her right) and I was pulling the horn hard, but we got her to pick up the problem lead. I ended up needing to spend a lot of time conditioning her as she had some strength issues, but now she does right fine on those leads.

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

Go you! That is all.