I've just been sent a video and it's made my day!
I've been working with a horse called Pharaoh, a Welsh x arab.
He found canter very difficult with and without the rider. He could only canter on one lead and would disunite behind. He couldn’t balance his own body so no wonder trying to balance with the weight of the rider was impossible so the rider often ended up on the floor!
Jenny his owner has invested a lot of time and money to help him out.
She has had lessons to help her seat and balance and I’ve done lots of groundwork with Pharaoh to help his balance, coordination and correct canter lead.
So to be sent this video is what makes my job so worthwhile! The joy in Jenny’s voice is wonderful 😁
To keep our teaching licence up to date we need to either present one of our own students or teach an unknown horse and rider. So at the recent legerete clinic i presented my student Jennifer Brown and her horse Oskar.
Oskar is a Welsh sec D and has been a tricky little horse to say the least!
He is slightly croup high which can easily put him out of balance and his answer to regain his balance was to run faster. He would also brace his neck above the hands which made raising the neck to help him find his balance difficult. But, because of his confirmation riding with a longer neck was also tricky. He tested my knowledge of what to do for the best, he didn’t have straight forward asymmetry to deal with.
I would often have Pk’s voice in my head ‘look at what is happening and do the opposite’
‘the horse will give you the answer to the best solution’
Oskar has taught me a lot and hasn’t made finding the right solution easy for me at all. Its horses like Oskar who make us better teachers.
Oskar also did a good job in teaching jenny not to dare use her legs and because of the speed she was very discreetly holding with her hands. This made riding the lateral work extremely tricky, Oskar would run from the legs and then get tense from the hands.
Canter has been the worse gait, Jenny would often have no steering and Oskar would have all his weight down on the shoulders. Plus, once we worked on the canter we could never include anything else in the same session. Its been a bit like a roller coaster ride !
But with time and dedication things are really beginning to fall into place.
We are now at the stage where we can begin to add poll flexion and improve the canter.
A very special thank you to Jenny and Oskar you both made me feel very proud of our progress . Who’d have thought we would have a slow Oskar in a strange place away from home in an indoor school with an audience …. Amazing
We had good feed back from Sylvia Stossel with advice in how to mo
The Legerete clinic was amazing as usual, Sylvia has many ideas and exercises to help each individual horse and rider.
For me and Espirito it was focused on helping the collection with shoulder-in transitions which included transitions within the pace, forward active shoulder-in to a short more collected stride but keeping the same activity. We also included the rein back transitions too. We worked on the spanish walk by improving the forward active walk before i asked for the spanish walk to help the shoulders stay a bit straighter and steady the head position.
We worked on the canter changes on the last day and although i didn’t manage any clean changes i now how some useful exercises to help Espirito think a bit more about the hind legs but to also help me ride a confident change and keep myself in balance when i ask. Espirito used to leap around a lot and would anticipate when i was going to ask for the change. This has caused me to lean forward in the change and if I’m honest i was just hoping i would land back in the saddle as the change used to catapulte me in the air. This doesnt happen now so i need to ride the change as i would a normal transition to canter and help him by staying in balance.
The exercise we used at the beginning was canter circles, inside lead, transition to walk, renvers, counter canter. We then rode the transition without the walk transition to develop the change. The problem i have at home is the school is 20meters wide and this isn’t wide enough to ride this exercise as well as i can at the clinics where the school is much wider and we find it very difficult at home. For this reason i haven’t practised the canter changes since my last clinic with Sylvia. I didn’t want to confirm the late change any more than it was already. So what Sylvia suggested was to ride a small circle in the second corner of the school in a counter bend, ride out of the small circle to the diagonal line and ask for the change. This helps me a lot to
I'll go through my video later but Jen just sent me some of her and Oskar.
It was such a pleasure to watch them both.
Oskar was a little speed demon, often tense and out of balance. He had lots of ideas of his own and thought my ideas were rubbish 😂 I persuaded him my ideas were worth a try and now he is a totally different horse!
