International Dressage Coaching: Australia

Back From Australia April 2013

26 APR 2013

Life is just about getting back to normal following my recent coaching trip to Australia. It is lovely to be back riding and training our own horses; I really miss them when I'm away, though I'm not sure if the feeling is mutual! Australia is a fantastic place to coach, not least because of the warm weather, but also there is a huge enthusiasm for Ride With Your Mind out there.

Australian coach, Ann Montgomery (course host) and Cara Kimber do much to promote RWYM in W.A and make sure that any breakthroughs with rider are consolidated once I go home.

This recent trip will have been my 6th, and it is noticeable how I was much more able to delve deeper into the layers of learning biomechanics.

We often talk about learning like layers of an onion:- you can think you have learned something, perhaps one of our basic tenets such as shoulder/hip/heel alignment, and on one level, that may be true. By the time you can apply that to walk, trot, canter and transitions (and to both legs!) you are already doing amazingly well, and it is in those challenges (transitions & symmetry in both sides) that many of the 'deeper layers of the onion' need to be addressed.

This time round in the Australian clinics, there were some really good examples of this.

On the 3 day lateral course, many riders got into 'waterskiing' at some point. 'Waterskiing' could be defined as leaning in the opposite direction to motion, and more commonly applies to the front/back plane. The usual scenario is that  the rider leans back, grows too tall in the front of the torso, and/or gets too heavy in the foot with the lower leg forward.

In the speedy horse, this nearly always results in the horse becoming a motorboat! In the more phlegmatic type of horse, it can show as a lack of go, as the rider's centre of gravity heads backwards towards the loin, making it too difficult for him to lift his back and therefore to engage his hindleg in an energetic way.

What is always obvious though, is that length in the front of the riders body (when waterskiing) always leads to length in the underside of the horse. This will show up as hollowing, head up, sagging tummy and heavy shoulders, and, even after all these years it still blows me away, the dramatic change which happens when you re-align a rider and shorten their frontline. The horse will reach forward and down with the neck and lift the back within seconds, often instantly!

So, back to Australia, our lateral work clinic and the riders who waterskiied sideways, leaning away from the direction of motion. This is often done by riders who are not getting enough reactivity from the horse and is part of what happens when, to a lesser or greater degree, the rider becomes desperate to make something happen! (If you ride, you will understand desperate - we have all been there!)

As the rider leans away from the direction of motion, the side of their body which they lean to becomes short, which the side they lean away from becomes long. The horse, of course, obliges by motorboating sideways!

If that side of the horse also lengthens, the lateral step becomes a fall sideways, often through the horse's shoulder. On the other side of the horse there is often too much bend, and as the rider's weight sits too much over the inside hindleg, the horse finds it difficult to step across with that leg, and the movement falls into disarray.

There were two main steps to correcting this:-

1) Use groundwork to help the horse's reactivity to the aid

and

2) Keep shoulder hip heel alignment on the 'recieving' or 'leading' side of the rider's, not just when viewing the rider from the side, but also when viewing the rider from the back or the front.

That is, if you stand behind a friend doing lateral work, do both of her shoulders stack up vertically over both of her seatbones?

Try it, and you will notice, like my Australian riders, a new control of the horses outside shoulder.

Ok, that's my first blog completed, rain stopped, sunshine out, so off down to the arena to see if I can avoid getting waterskiied on Taf!