[QUOTE=Pocket Pony;7191337]
I KNOW!!! I have ridden for 30 years or so. Until the past two years, I’ve always been in training/lessons. NO ONE that I can remember has ever talked to me about timing of the aids. NO ONE!!! In 30 years!!! I’ve done h/j, dressage, eventing, and until my foray into the “western” world, not a word of timing was ever spoken. And I can’t believe how much of a difference it makes. Like if I ask NOW then turning or doing some kind of lateral work is (relatively) easy. And if I ask in NOW + 1 step, then it is hard and there’s brace in the movement. And for Mac, at least, the pressure-release type of system is just so much easier to understand and use as a tool for development. Lightness is now something that we have throughout the ride, not at the very end and only for a couple minutes because after we’ve argued he finally gave up. He’s advanced more in the past 6 months than in the couple years beforehand, and the feel I have with him I really didn’t think was possible.
:)[/QUOTE]
It is shocking, isn’t it?
I sort of cringe and get humbled when I think of all the times I ground my leg on a horse. Um… he wasn’t moving despite all that and enduring pain because he physically couldn’t. Had I asked him to move over at the moment he could, he would have. “Oops, my bad.” And it’s a pretty big bad, plus a common one.
Same for the lightness thing. How can we expect a horse to show up and (with his orange-size brain) learn what we are looking for if he only gets it after a struggle and at the end of a ride? Remembering that these animals didn’t ask to be trained to do diddly, why would a horse continue to show up and try every day if he were offered such a bad deal?
I do think great trainers in any discipline emphasize putting the horse in the desired position 100% of the time. And those talented riders are good enough to do it. They also use contrast all the time. But those things really don’t trickle down to most students in most disciplines.
You have to get lucky and find a great horseman to learn it. And as often as not IME, those aren’t the average “going to shows, running a show barn” trainers. The top guys-- think Joe Fargis do it. And the very bottom, obscure, barely making a living but that’s the person you send your screwed up ones to— those guys often have this kind of horsemanship, too. Most of them can teach it (because they have rational systems that they can explain to themselves, and therefore to us). But some can’t teach the physical part for the same reason that talented riders often suck: Feel and timing comes so naturally to them that they don’t have words for what they do and how they know to do it.
