Sleight of hip

I had my lesson in the morning and I was surprised when both RI and her trainee observed that Sammie actually looked a bit loser on the back end. Quite comforting that they could see a minor improvement rather than any problems at the moment. Time will tell.

RI understood that I had been taking it a bit easy with Sammie since the shoes had come off, so we spent some time revisiting subtle aids and getting his hocks to really lift up in trot. Then we worked some more on the paces within trot. This was followed by some sideways work with Sammie crossing his legs beautifully at one point.

Then we moved onto canter, again with subtle aids. By the end, just one gentle nudge with my inside leg and a slight lift of the hip, brought an immediate reaction and RI said you couldn't actually see me doing anything at all. One interesting thing she made me do was put my stirrups up a hole. She said as I hadn't been riding so much I didn't look comfortable. I thought I'd feel like a jockey but it actually felt so much better, helping my legs to stay more still and gluing my backside to the saddle in canter.

RI said that some days you can ride longer and some days you just can't, so there's no point struggling and getting into bad habits. Although you obviously shouldn't ride too short, her point of view is that once the legs and backside learn where they should be and what they should be doing, they will be able to do it at any length, but they have to learn first. So if on some days you feel you're struggling with longer stirrups, make yourself more comfortable and put them up a hole as you'll ride a lot better. Made perfect sense to me.

Sammie was a superstar, but I know and I can see where I keep confusing him and blocking him at times - poor boy. His cantering at the end was lovely on the left rein, but then RI upped the ante a bit more and said we needed to work on paces within the canter with a big smile on her face. Hmmm...now that was hard work! We worked on that for a wee bit by using core strength to slow it down. I used too much and Sammie came to a standstill, so at least I learnt something!

RI was explaining about asking for canter when the inside shoulder is moving forwards as this gets the horse to lead from their back end rather than their front end, so you get a much better canter.

I just love all this stuff about the subtle aids; nobody can see what you're doing but things happen. My RI is really into this, not only because it looks far better, but it also means that the horse is really listening and won't get deadened to constant requests. That's what had happened to Sammie before he was mine, and that's what we had to work through together. You have to be consistent when retraining, and while I'm certainly not consistent enough (yet), I do have Sammie going into canter from a nudge of my inside leg and a lift of my inside hip, so subtle that you can't even see what's happening. That is truly, truly amazing to me. I just wish we could have RI there with us more often. She really does have a great way of getting us to focus and learn and have some fun at the same time.