WHEW.

I’ve been running around like an idiot (emphasis on idiot) but I wanted to capture a few of the learnings from the last couple weeks so that my silly brain doesn’t lose them.

Last night I had a dressage lesson where we worked on some big-kid stuff, namely canter half pass. Jack has a good concept of haunches in on a circle, so mostly this involved trying to get the haunches in as we travel on a short diagonal. In theory, this should set us up for success once we get to learning flying changes, as we can use the lateral movement to help him think about sitting versus exploding through his shoulders (which is his MO in general).

The exercise

The way we introduced this concept to him was by trying what E called ‘the paperclip’, that is getting his haunches in and him sitting, then trying to bring that across a short diagonal before turning and trying again. To really get him to step sideways she had me leaning into the direction to show him more clearly which way we were going. Apparently Carl Hester has some students lean so far as to look at the inside hind as they ride it, but luckily I wasn’t asked to do that!

I have been feeling rather crooked recently, and so we also worked on an exercise to see where I am sitting in the saddle. This involved thinking of the seat of the saddle as a clock face, and I tried to land my seat at 3 and 9 when posting, then 12 and 6, then post around the clock backwards and forwards. It was definitely an interesting feeling and gave me a better feel of where I was in the saddle, so I’ll be playing around with that in my warm up whenever I feel super crooked.

mind numbing

In case you are simply burning with desire to see part of our lesson, a lovely friend took some video for me. You can see a bit of our warm up here, which includes references to the clock idea, and also some canter where we do micromovements- pushing his haunches in and out, flexing him right and left, and moving his shoulders around.