I can’t cut up quotes, so you are in bold, I’m in plaint font, all interspersed.
[QUOTE=VaqueroToro;6876835]
Another reason why I’d love to ride with a centered riding or biomechanics instructor sometime – being an adult learner puts me at an “old body with ingrained bad posture” disadvantage. I do try my best to square as far as I can observe, but I’m not sure how close it is to reality.
Choose whatever instructor has the language you can understand. It ain’t philosophy or physics that will help you. Most of the time, it’s learning body awareness. So whoever says the magic words that let your find your shoulder or sitting bone or heel or whatever is the right person. IME, the most talented, athletic, young rider is not that person. He/she naturally has the body awareness and skill that we are trying to learn. He/she might not have a whole lot of words that can help us because he/she was never forced to find them.
Your well-broke horse is a huge teacher as well. In between lessons, we get biofeedback from our horses as we ride. How they go tells us how we are riding. Riding “slower” as I have described (waiting longer between corrections and for the particular answer you horse gives you to some aid) will do a lot to increase your body awareness. I think we have the same problems with the “fast ride” as the horse does: We can’t feel a lot about what we did physically because we have moved on to the next thing, so we can’t learn to repeat it.
a) determining what aid I really want her to to turn off of and b) using that as the first aid with the others as back up/the enforcement really makes sense.
IME, this is all that horse training amounts to at the very, very bottom of things.
So I’ve been actually over riding her, which ends up with me needing to over ride her again on the correction, and off to the wiggles we go. I’m the obnoxious coworker that never lets you get a word in edgewise at a staff meeting and just rattles on and on about stupid and irrelevant stuff.
Yes, you are over-riding her but it has more to do with the speed of your interaction with her than the “topics” of conversation.
A conversation with a horse is like a tennis game-- players alternate. So you have to go at a speed that allows the horse to “say something.” You can give more than one aid at once-- say, you turn your shoulders and pick up you hand in order to bend the horse. But if that doesn’t work out, you stop and get “harder” with the part of the aid that the horse didn’t hear until he answers it. Remember to hesitate to make the mouth your go-to fix.
So in this example, I should not be controlling the entire turn throughout the 90 degrees, I’m just make the initial suggestion that we go that way, then lay off and let her do it once she gets the idea that we’re heading to the right?
Yes! It’s a very kind way to ride a horse. You stop asking when it’s clear that they know what you mean and are executing it. The rest, like finishing the turn, is the horse negotiating with physics. No need for you to keep yelling at him with your hand after he said “I heard you, and I’m getting it done ASAP.”
For most of my riding career it’s been instruction along the lines of “ride a circle around that cone,” but very seldom do I get “how to ride a circle around that cone.” I’m left on my own to fill in all the holes in the swiss cheese. Tips like these makes up the “how”.
Yeah, the “how” and “what did I feel this time vs. last time” or “what happens if I add this aid or take away that aid”-- those are the things that should come with the “go do this or that.”
This is a PITA to read. It only makes sense of you have already thought a lot about training and riding. (But adult “theory heads” like me are good students of talk.) All this is to say that if you and I and your very broke mare were in the ring together, you’d have this figured out on 20 minutes.
