Silversand Horsemanship Clinic - September 2008
This was the fourth clinic I have ridden on this summer, two with Tom Widdicombe and two with Steve Halfpenny and with the September Silversand weekend having been the longest-standing fixture on our clinic timetable it's also the official end of summer as far as we are concerned.
In this case I appear to have taken rather fewer notes than I have in the past. This may be in part because of the sheer effort involved in typing them up, but it’s also because my learning experience means that I can do a lot of the things I have previously documented at least passably and much of what I'm learning now is about a feel in the rein or a way of moving rather than something that is easy to express in writing. I'm not getting things right by any means, but the big picture isn't so bad now and the details are much harder to write down.
I shall endeavour to compensate by having lots of pictures...
The September Silversand clinic is the end of the summer for us.
Friday
We began the weekend with the usual discussion of what everyone wanted to focus on over the next four days- the main topics that came up were Transitions, Feel, Relaxation, Softness, Forwards with Softness and Confidence.
From Steve's point of view he was continuing in his ongoing crusade to stop people pulling on their horses. The way he works, any time you are putting constant pressure on the lead or the rein, you are pulling on your horse and any time you are pulling on your horse you are teaching them to pull back on you. He advocates using a modulated pressure for everything, so you're creating more of a pulsing feel than a steady pull and wherever possible to find a way to push rather than pull. One of the really significant things about the way we do groundwork from the Silversand approach is that it all maps directly to the riding, as Steve said: "I'm riding this horse from the ground. I'm not going to pull because I can't do that from the saddle."
One of the big themes of this course was using the indirect rein; for those of you not familiar with the terminology, the indirect rein is what you use to control the opposite hind-foot. So when you are disengaging a horse as you might for a one-rein stop, you are using the indirect rein to pick up the opposite hind foot. The direct rein is what you are using when you pick up the rein to control the foot corresponding to that rein, so your regular steering is more likely to be working off the direct rein to start with.
Steve using his indirect rein with Rosie, she has already stepped out with her outside foot and is now following on with the inside.
As we have done over the last few clinics, we worked with a morning and afternoon group- in this case each consisting of three riders. The morning group for this clinic consisted of sleepsy_mouse and Small Pony, old friends Lin and Namara and Alison and Rosie, a team who hadn't come to any of our Kent clinics before but had been learning with Steve in the New Forest earlier in the year. Rosie is a beautiful young chestnut quarter horse mare who Alison rides western but moves like a dressage horse. The afternoon group featured Kerin and her elegant but tremulous trakhener mare Lottie, Camilla and her feisty enormo-warmblood Ferrum and Zorro and I . We worked on broadly the same exercises so I’m going to describe what we did each day in turn.
Everyone started by working out in the field and began by getting the horses to work without pulling on them. The starting point for this is to set things up so the horse moves their shoulder away from you in the direction you want until they put you in the right position ( approximately level with the saddle ) and then move off with them. Steve introduced the idea of working with a clock face to help everyone get this idea - if you imagine that your horse is the hand on a clock, with their nose at the centre and their tail at 12 O'clock. If you want to turn the shoulder towards the left, you need to be pushing the right shoulder towards 2 O'clock, if you want to move it to the right you want to be pushing the left shoulder towards 10 O'Clock.
This may be best explained with a diagram:
Steve considers the position here is absolutely essential - before you can develop the shape, correct the balance or anything else you need to be working from behind the drive line and this is a great way to get there without pulling on your horse.
The next exercise they worked on was starting on a straight line, disengaging the horse ( by letting them run into the indirect rein ) and turning them into back up then after a few steps of backup allowing the shoulder to come round and turning it back into forwards. As I understood it the goal with this exercise is to get the whole exercise working along a line, but initially you might make the turns smaller so you described three sides of a rectangle with a ninety degree disengage and then a ninety degree turn on the hindquarters to return to forward movement.
Namara and Lin
Moving onto riding and the starting point was the same, getting an absolutely consistent, light, disengagement the minute you pick up the indirect rein. To do this you are likely to need to begin by asking with the modulated pressure so that rather than pulling on the rein you are asking in a bump-bump-bump kind of way - those can be fairly sharp as well, the idea is that the horse responds really quickly the moment you ask so you quickly reach the point where they respond to pressure coming onto the rein and don’t need you to actually ask with more than a slight change in your hand.
Small pony on the indirect rein on the ground...
... and under saddle
One throwaway phrase Steve came out with that I think got a lot of us thinking was “Soft hands lead to a hard mouth” - it’s very easy to be too soft with the reins thinking we are being kind when really we are teaching the horse to pull on the bit and creating a grey area that can cause problems later on. Much better for both horse and rider to deal with any resistance to the bit by ironing it out when it first shows itself and keeping things clear and understandable.
Steve showing me what it should feel like working on the rein.
Another useful thing working with the rein is to think about exaggerating the way you use your hands initially, so when you use the indirect rein, to start with you might take it up towards your opposite shoulder, as though you were reaching for the seatbelt when you get into your car. When you use the direct rein it can make things a lot clearer for the horse if you take your hand right out to the side to help them follow that feel sideways. In both cases the horse can only move when their foot is off the ground anyway, so you need to concentrate on timing your requests so that you make them as the horse is able to respond if you want to get things working really lightly. I was surprised how much clearer this made things even for a relatively experienced horse like Zorro. Once you have established the clarity of these cues it’s easy to make them more subtle.
Lottie being a western horse.
A lot of the ideas at the Silversand clinics this year have been about patterns, how we form them - both horses and humans - and how we can change them. Steve was doing a good job of catching us slipping back into old habits and just checking that we were aware of it.
Saturday
We started the day going back over some of the things that had come up on Friday, talking about controlling the shoulders- Steve reiterated that you want the shoulders to be yielding absolutely unquestioningly for pretty much every maneuvre, something that is often a problem I have with Zorro. He'll move his head and his hindquarters but take every opportunity to drop that shoulder in on me. Steve also talked about the importance of making sure the horse moves first- you don't step before they do and to get them moving, cue them up, prepare to move off and if that doesn't set them in motion, create a push- whatever happens don't lead witn your hand- if necessary leave your hand in your pocket to keep out of the pattern of putting a hand in front to ask the horse forward.
In the morning they worked on getting Rosie to stay with her human - she was tending to shut off mentally and stop trying to offer anything she was asked for, probably as a result of the way she had been trained in the past. They worked on building up into movement from simple bends, just getting her to bring her head round softly and then extending that out into turning in a way she could accept more willingly.
sleepsy_mouse and Small were working on getting consistent and calm work and Steve noticed that she was tending to look down at Small so they did some work on her just focussing on him, breathing in a measured way and riding a circle around him.
Keeping focus on Steve
Working in the saddle we performed the same exercise we had the day before, turning on the forehand to backup and turning on the quarters out of it. Steve made the observation that we were tending to release too slowly- timing your release really is everything in horsemanship and the better you get that timing the better everything else will be.
Exploring the wider field.
Working to get Namara backing up nicely without leaning on the bit.
Small, trotting through the long grass.
By the end of the morning Small pony and sleepsy_mouse went for an amazing canter out across the field and up to the audience which would have been unimaginable for the tense and nervous horse who arrived with us a little more than a year ago, it was absolutely beautiful to watch and there wasn't a dry eye in the house at the end of it. Moments like that are what this whole thing is about.
Not a great photo, but my goodness what an amazing moment.
I started the afternoon session by getting myself kicked. It wasn't my finest moment, I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, having misjudged Zorro's mood, but even so it's a long time since he has even really kicked out at me so I wasn't prepared for it. He caught me in upper half of my right thigh and it was hard enough that you could hear it right across the field and the impression one gets is that if he had been shod my leg would have been broken. As it is, four weeks on I'm walking reasonably soundly but I can't run and the bruising is still coming up. Steve, who was right on the point of warning me when I got lamped, took over my horse while I sat down and applied a cold pack to my injured leg and used him as demonstration horse for a while...
Steve works with Zorro to get some of the punchiness out...
..still a bit punchy...
... capable of a degree of collection ...
... thinking maybe running away is an acceptable plan B.
"Perhaps your leadership is...acceptable...human. For now."
Riding with one-rein- Steve uses the tail of the rope to stop Zorro bending to the side where the rein is when he hasn't been asked.
Being clinician's horse is hard work.
An hour or so later, in spite of the fact I was in a lot of pain, I figured although I could hardly walk I didn't need my thigh to be working in order to ride my horse, so I hopped on and we got on with a bit more riding. Considering my condition we got surprisingly much done, but later that evening our friend Karen, who organises the clinics and sleepsy_mouse and I spent a few boring hours in Tunbridge Wells A&E so I could get my leg checked out. Turns out I just needed off the shelf painkillers but I felt better for having been checked over.
No more groundwork for me!
Ferrum in action. He's a continental warmblood and the dressage runs bone-deep in him. He's all about the action.
Sunday
On the ground we began by working on side-pass. Steve starts this by working the horse on a circle and just putting a lot of energy towards them to push them out and off it. By really picking his life up he gets a canter sidepass which he can then work with to build it in to slower paces without the horse's feet getting stuck. It's also a useful exercise for when the horse is leaning in on the circle to push them back into uprightness.
It was interesting to see how this needed to vary between horses- arabian Namara and Small Pony needed hardly more than a breath to get them really springing sideways and with Namara part of the exercise that was really important was making it clear when she is being asked for something and when she is not- she is a very subtle horse and so she tends to interpret things that were not neccessarily supposed to be communicative. Small tends to take any cue as a request for forward and Steve had to do some work with him to start him looking for the thing he was asked for rather than using running away as an evasion for everything. As soon as Small does start thinking he's a very smart pony, but if he can get out of a situation by running he'll happly choose to do that.
Sideways!
A problem people tend to have in this work is that they find it difficult to bring up the amount of energy that is needed for it and find it hard to do so without getting too emotionally involved- I know I can be absolutely effective if I'm angry so one of the things I've been working on is learning to separate the effectiveness from the emotion. For me I think this is also a matter of confidence that I am doing the right thing because if one gets things wrong at these higher energy levels one can create problems rather than solving them. A lot of people find it difficult because they are afraid of how the horse will respond to it or they don't feel they can handle what the horse might do - this is one place where having Steve or someone similar work with them is really useful because they can see then what the horse actually does do when it comes to faster or higher energy work and learn to deal with it- as ever the unknown is the most difficult fear to resolve.
Rosie may be a quarter horse in a western saddle but she has a beautiful floaty trot.
Steve described how getting these more complex movements starts to really improve the simpler one- backup on a circle improves your regular backup and control of the shoulder, working sidewasy improves your control of the shoulder and the hindquarters. When we can raise the bar, everything below it will work out better.
Small Pony, serial hat thief.
Beautiful backlit Namara
Interestingly, working in the afternoon I was more effective than I have ever been with Zorro- because I could barely walk, I was having to really get him doing most of the work, which mean't I had to keep him at a distance and make him move a lot further for each step I took and really focussing on control at a distance. Also, because I was so lame I had a walking stick I had borrowed from our generous host, which, as I was holding it, I was using like my regular training stick. This was interesting because one of the other things I do is a martial art named Ninjutsu, I don't talk about it that often on here, but I train fairly regularly and I hold a dan grade. We use a lot of weapons including short sticks and walking sticks in our training and it turns out that if I'm holding a walking stick out I hold it like a weapon, as an extension of my thought and body, and something about that mindset with it obviously conveyed itself to Zorro because he responded in a totally different way to how he has ever responded to my regular training stick. Of course, it would never in a million years have occurred to me to think of something I was using with my horse in that way, but because I was using something that was already part of that pattern for me it made a big difference to both of us.
Steve did some work with the flag to help us put a bit more life into our work:
Zorro found this quite useful.
Lottie found it terrifying. And Steve isn't even in shot here. She's alright with a fabric flag, but this one was an old sainsburys bag which clearly means it's the end of the world for black warmbloods. Steve ended up doing quite a lot of work with her on this until she could accept it being around her.
Zorro and I going for a bit of a trot out on the field.
One of the things that was interesting during the afternoon session was work that Kerin and Lottie were doing with balance and control- because the hill was at a gentle incline, Lottie was tending to get anxious at some points because she wasn't comfortable with going up or down hill. Steve had them working on a figure of eight around him and a water trough in the field, aiming to change speed in a way that totally ignores where you are in terms of gradient. This exercise seemed to really help Lottie and take her mind off whether she was going up or downhill ( on a figure of eight that is always changing ) and more on what she was being asked to do- soon she was starting to really regulate her paces beautifully.
Lottie is a dressage horse.
A field with room for cantering- I really like this picture.
Monday
My notes from this day are, if I'm honest, a trifle sparse. Everyone was working hard to consolidate the things that we had been doing over the previous three days and see how far we could take them forward.
With Small, sleepsy_mouse was doing the same exercise as Kerin and Lottie the day before, controlling the pace over a changed gradient. Sleepsy_mouse was tending to focus too much on Small and not on where they were going. Steve observed that a short focus can slow things down a little, so it's quite possible that she has started to do that as a result of Small's tendency to accellerate as a response to more or less any cue. They worked on the same exercise as Kerin and Lottie the day before, which Parelli taught as "the Sugarfoot Jog" but for some reason everyone on this clinic remembered as "Fancy Fairy Feet" and so it will presumably be known from now on. With this pair an important element was to stay focussed at least a quarter of a circle ahead at all times. The figure eight, with it's change of rein in the middle, is a great way of keeping things varied for the horse in this kind of exercise.
A slightly fuzzy shot, but I've finally got a picture that shows how big Small's stride is in trot.
On the rampage again!
Working with softness, Steve observed that to keep softness you have to understand how you got it in the first place. Sometimes there are shortcuts but before we can start breaking the rules we have to know what they are.
Karen French, Silversand Associate and Alexander Technique Instructor, helps Lin with her position. Sgt Wilson, Clinic Cat, helps by looking quizzical.
After a while in the field, everyone was very happy with what they had got and so we headed off en-masse to the area outside the corner of the field, where there were some banks that we could use to work on going up and down hill. The trick here was to get the horse to control the speed with their hind feet and their direction with the front. We would set off carefully down the bank and the moment we felt the horse starting to hollow their back away and support themselves on their forehand we would stop and start to back up until they were back in a good shape and then set off again until they are working carefully whenever you ask them to go downhill.
Some of the horses found this really difficult- Rosie needed quite a while of gentle encouragement from Steve before she could handle being asked to back up on the slope at all.
Small, physically adept at the best of times, was a natural at this.
Lottie doing the Fancy Fairy Feet exercise.
Lottie gets a big hug, looks impressed with it.
Steve shows me how to tie the mecate.
Ferrum!
In the afternoon, I was having trouble getting Zorro straight - he constantly wants to bend one way or another - and Steve suggested I try using the fence to give us at least one straight side, but it turned out that the fence itself was pretty scary and the corner of the fence at the bottom of the field was downright terrifying. In the end Steve came with me and helped us get to that corner, which ended up doing a bit of advance and retreat to get nearer to it and then when Zorro couldn't face it at all, carefully backing up into the corner. Steve just stayed in front of me and showed me where straight was, which was essential as Zorro was wiggling around like an eel trying to avoid going into the Empty Corner Of TERROR which he regarded as entirely full of angry lions hungry for tasty black cob. We got there for a moment and then used the amount of energy that we had built up to have a really stomping trot back up to the top of the field, where it really felt like my little round cob was really a flouncy andalucian...
(Note Steve in the background, knackered after having just run up the hill with us.)
We went down to the banks to do some work on the hills - riding downhill is something I have always found quite scary, but it was much easier on my injured leg getting across the rough and bumpy ground to the banks on horseback than it had been in the morning trying to carry a chair. Once again the three horses were quite different- Namara kept things in her calm stride, Lottie could not handle more than standing on the flat, taking a couple of steps of backup onto the hill and coming back down, and Zorro looked after me very well and did a good job at being well behaved right up until I asked him to go down the longest bank, which he obviously disapproved of giving a big buck and a squeal before realising we were actually at the top of a tall bank and really there wasn't anywhere to go that didn't involve a lot of downhill and calmly allowing me to guide him back down the easy way.
Down a steep bank. Am I holding on to the front of my saddle there? Totally. Never mind precise control, I just wanted to get down that alive. Also it was much steeper than it looks in the picture, honest.
I feel like this report is woefully incomplete- there were so many significant things going on that I have missed- Lottie's beautiful dressage horse stylings on monday afternoon, the amazing potential Ferrum showed throughout ( Ferrum and Camilla have hardly had a mention ) and everyone had moments of brilliance and took valuable steps on their own journeys. It is a real pleasure to be part of such a dedicated and thoughtful group of students with such beautiful and charming horses.
x-post with horsemanship
In this case I appear to have taken rather fewer notes than I have in the past. This may be in part because of the sheer effort involved in typing them up, but it’s also because my learning experience means that I can do a lot of the things I have previously documented at least passably and much of what I'm learning now is about a feel in the rein or a way of moving rather than something that is easy to express in writing. I'm not getting things right by any means, but the big picture isn't so bad now and the details are much harder to write down.
I shall endeavour to compensate by having lots of pictures...
The September Silversand clinic is the end of the summer for us.
Friday
We began the weekend with the usual discussion of what everyone wanted to focus on over the next four days- the main topics that came up were Transitions, Feel, Relaxation, Softness, Forwards with Softness and Confidence.
From Steve's point of view he was continuing in his ongoing crusade to stop people pulling on their horses. The way he works, any time you are putting constant pressure on the lead or the rein, you are pulling on your horse and any time you are pulling on your horse you are teaching them to pull back on you. He advocates using a modulated pressure for everything, so you're creating more of a pulsing feel than a steady pull and wherever possible to find a way to push rather than pull. One of the really significant things about the way we do groundwork from the Silversand approach is that it all maps directly to the riding, as Steve said: "I'm riding this horse from the ground. I'm not going to pull because I can't do that from the saddle."
One of the big themes of this course was using the indirect rein; for those of you not familiar with the terminology, the indirect rein is what you use to control the opposite hind-foot. So when you are disengaging a horse as you might for a one-rein stop, you are using the indirect rein to pick up the opposite hind foot. The direct rein is what you are using when you pick up the rein to control the foot corresponding to that rein, so your regular steering is more likely to be working off the direct rein to start with.
Steve using his indirect rein with Rosie, she has already stepped out with her outside foot and is now following on with the inside.
As we have done over the last few clinics, we worked with a morning and afternoon group- in this case each consisting of three riders. The morning group for this clinic consisted of sleepsy_mouse and Small Pony, old friends Lin and Namara and Alison and Rosie, a team who hadn't come to any of our Kent clinics before but had been learning with Steve in the New Forest earlier in the year. Rosie is a beautiful young chestnut quarter horse mare who Alison rides western but moves like a dressage horse. The afternoon group featured Kerin and her elegant but tremulous trakhener mare Lottie, Camilla and her feisty enormo-warmblood Ferrum and Zorro and I . We worked on broadly the same exercises so I’m going to describe what we did each day in turn.
Everyone started by working out in the field and began by getting the horses to work without pulling on them. The starting point for this is to set things up so the horse moves their shoulder away from you in the direction you want until they put you in the right position ( approximately level with the saddle ) and then move off with them. Steve introduced the idea of working with a clock face to help everyone get this idea - if you imagine that your horse is the hand on a clock, with their nose at the centre and their tail at 12 O'clock. If you want to turn the shoulder towards the left, you need to be pushing the right shoulder towards 2 O'clock, if you want to move it to the right you want to be pushing the left shoulder towards 10 O'Clock.
This may be best explained with a diagram:
Steve considers the position here is absolutely essential - before you can develop the shape, correct the balance or anything else you need to be working from behind the drive line and this is a great way to get there without pulling on your horse.
The next exercise they worked on was starting on a straight line, disengaging the horse ( by letting them run into the indirect rein ) and turning them into back up then after a few steps of backup allowing the shoulder to come round and turning it back into forwards. As I understood it the goal with this exercise is to get the whole exercise working along a line, but initially you might make the turns smaller so you described three sides of a rectangle with a ninety degree disengage and then a ninety degree turn on the hindquarters to return to forward movement.
Namara and Lin
Moving onto riding and the starting point was the same, getting an absolutely consistent, light, disengagement the minute you pick up the indirect rein. To do this you are likely to need to begin by asking with the modulated pressure so that rather than pulling on the rein you are asking in a bump-bump-bump kind of way - those can be fairly sharp as well, the idea is that the horse responds really quickly the moment you ask so you quickly reach the point where they respond to pressure coming onto the rein and don’t need you to actually ask with more than a slight change in your hand.
Small pony on the indirect rein on the ground...
... and under saddle
One throwaway phrase Steve came out with that I think got a lot of us thinking was “Soft hands lead to a hard mouth” - it’s very easy to be too soft with the reins thinking we are being kind when really we are teaching the horse to pull on the bit and creating a grey area that can cause problems later on. Much better for both horse and rider to deal with any resistance to the bit by ironing it out when it first shows itself and keeping things clear and understandable.
Steve showing me what it should feel like working on the rein.
Another useful thing working with the rein is to think about exaggerating the way you use your hands initially, so when you use the indirect rein, to start with you might take it up towards your opposite shoulder, as though you were reaching for the seatbelt when you get into your car. When you use the direct rein it can make things a lot clearer for the horse if you take your hand right out to the side to help them follow that feel sideways. In both cases the horse can only move when their foot is off the ground anyway, so you need to concentrate on timing your requests so that you make them as the horse is able to respond if you want to get things working really lightly. I was surprised how much clearer this made things even for a relatively experienced horse like Zorro. Once you have established the clarity of these cues it’s easy to make them more subtle.
Lottie being a western horse.
A lot of the ideas at the Silversand clinics this year have been about patterns, how we form them - both horses and humans - and how we can change them. Steve was doing a good job of catching us slipping back into old habits and just checking that we were aware of it.
Saturday
We started the day going back over some of the things that had come up on Friday, talking about controlling the shoulders- Steve reiterated that you want the shoulders to be yielding absolutely unquestioningly for pretty much every maneuvre, something that is often a problem I have with Zorro. He'll move his head and his hindquarters but take every opportunity to drop that shoulder in on me. Steve also talked about the importance of making sure the horse moves first- you don't step before they do and to get them moving, cue them up, prepare to move off and if that doesn't set them in motion, create a push- whatever happens don't lead witn your hand- if necessary leave your hand in your pocket to keep out of the pattern of putting a hand in front to ask the horse forward.
In the morning they worked on getting Rosie to stay with her human - she was tending to shut off mentally and stop trying to offer anything she was asked for, probably as a result of the way she had been trained in the past. They worked on building up into movement from simple bends, just getting her to bring her head round softly and then extending that out into turning in a way she could accept more willingly.
sleepsy_mouse and Small were working on getting consistent and calm work and Steve noticed that she was tending to look down at Small so they did some work on her just focussing on him, breathing in a measured way and riding a circle around him.
Keeping focus on Steve
Working in the saddle we performed the same exercise we had the day before, turning on the forehand to backup and turning on the quarters out of it. Steve made the observation that we were tending to release too slowly- timing your release really is everything in horsemanship and the better you get that timing the better everything else will be.
Exploring the wider field.
Working to get Namara backing up nicely without leaning on the bit.
Small, trotting through the long grass.
By the end of the morning Small pony and sleepsy_mouse went for an amazing canter out across the field and up to the audience which would have been unimaginable for the tense and nervous horse who arrived with us a little more than a year ago, it was absolutely beautiful to watch and there wasn't a dry eye in the house at the end of it. Moments like that are what this whole thing is about.
Not a great photo, but my goodness what an amazing moment.
I started the afternoon session by getting myself kicked. It wasn't my finest moment, I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, having misjudged Zorro's mood, but even so it's a long time since he has even really kicked out at me so I wasn't prepared for it. He caught me in upper half of my right thigh and it was hard enough that you could hear it right across the field and the impression one gets is that if he had been shod my leg would have been broken. As it is, four weeks on I'm walking reasonably soundly but I can't run and the bruising is still coming up. Steve, who was right on the point of warning me when I got lamped, took over my horse while I sat down and applied a cold pack to my injured leg and used him as demonstration horse for a while...
Steve works with Zorro to get some of the punchiness out...
..still a bit punchy...
... capable of a degree of collection ...
... thinking maybe running away is an acceptable plan B.
"Perhaps your leadership is...acceptable...human. For now."
Riding with one-rein- Steve uses the tail of the rope to stop Zorro bending to the side where the rein is when he hasn't been asked.
Being clinician's horse is hard work.
An hour or so later, in spite of the fact I was in a lot of pain, I figured although I could hardly walk I didn't need my thigh to be working in order to ride my horse, so I hopped on and we got on with a bit more riding. Considering my condition we got surprisingly much done, but later that evening our friend Karen, who organises the clinics and sleepsy_mouse and I spent a few boring hours in Tunbridge Wells A&E so I could get my leg checked out. Turns out I just needed off the shelf painkillers but I felt better for having been checked over.
No more groundwork for me!
Ferrum in action. He's a continental warmblood and the dressage runs bone-deep in him. He's all about the action.
Sunday
On the ground we began by working on side-pass. Steve starts this by working the horse on a circle and just putting a lot of energy towards them to push them out and off it. By really picking his life up he gets a canter sidepass which he can then work with to build it in to slower paces without the horse's feet getting stuck. It's also a useful exercise for when the horse is leaning in on the circle to push them back into uprightness.
It was interesting to see how this needed to vary between horses- arabian Namara and Small Pony needed hardly more than a breath to get them really springing sideways and with Namara part of the exercise that was really important was making it clear when she is being asked for something and when she is not- she is a very subtle horse and so she tends to interpret things that were not neccessarily supposed to be communicative. Small tends to take any cue as a request for forward and Steve had to do some work with him to start him looking for the thing he was asked for rather than using running away as an evasion for everything. As soon as Small does start thinking he's a very smart pony, but if he can get out of a situation by running he'll happly choose to do that.
Sideways!
A problem people tend to have in this work is that they find it difficult to bring up the amount of energy that is needed for it and find it hard to do so without getting too emotionally involved- I know I can be absolutely effective if I'm angry so one of the things I've been working on is learning to separate the effectiveness from the emotion. For me I think this is also a matter of confidence that I am doing the right thing because if one gets things wrong at these higher energy levels one can create problems rather than solving them. A lot of people find it difficult because they are afraid of how the horse will respond to it or they don't feel they can handle what the horse might do - this is one place where having Steve or someone similar work with them is really useful because they can see then what the horse actually does do when it comes to faster or higher energy work and learn to deal with it- as ever the unknown is the most difficult fear to resolve.
Rosie may be a quarter horse in a western saddle but she has a beautiful floaty trot.
Steve described how getting these more complex movements starts to really improve the simpler one- backup on a circle improves your regular backup and control of the shoulder, working sidewasy improves your control of the shoulder and the hindquarters. When we can raise the bar, everything below it will work out better.
Small Pony, serial hat thief.
Beautiful backlit Namara
Interestingly, working in the afternoon I was more effective than I have ever been with Zorro- because I could barely walk, I was having to really get him doing most of the work, which mean't I had to keep him at a distance and make him move a lot further for each step I took and really focussing on control at a distance. Also, because I was so lame I had a walking stick I had borrowed from our generous host, which, as I was holding it, I was using like my regular training stick. This was interesting because one of the other things I do is a martial art named Ninjutsu, I don't talk about it that often on here, but I train fairly regularly and I hold a dan grade. We use a lot of weapons including short sticks and walking sticks in our training and it turns out that if I'm holding a walking stick out I hold it like a weapon, as an extension of my thought and body, and something about that mindset with it obviously conveyed itself to Zorro because he responded in a totally different way to how he has ever responded to my regular training stick. Of course, it would never in a million years have occurred to me to think of something I was using with my horse in that way, but because I was using something that was already part of that pattern for me it made a big difference to both of us.
Steve did some work with the flag to help us put a bit more life into our work:
Zorro found this quite useful.
Lottie found it terrifying. And Steve isn't even in shot here. She's alright with a fabric flag, but this one was an old sainsburys bag which clearly means it's the end of the world for black warmbloods. Steve ended up doing quite a lot of work with her on this until she could accept it being around her.
Zorro and I going for a bit of a trot out on the field.
One of the things that was interesting during the afternoon session was work that Kerin and Lottie were doing with balance and control- because the hill was at a gentle incline, Lottie was tending to get anxious at some points because she wasn't comfortable with going up or down hill. Steve had them working on a figure of eight around him and a water trough in the field, aiming to change speed in a way that totally ignores where you are in terms of gradient. This exercise seemed to really help Lottie and take her mind off whether she was going up or downhill ( on a figure of eight that is always changing ) and more on what she was being asked to do- soon she was starting to really regulate her paces beautifully.
Lottie is a dressage horse.
A field with room for cantering- I really like this picture.
Monday
My notes from this day are, if I'm honest, a trifle sparse. Everyone was working hard to consolidate the things that we had been doing over the previous three days and see how far we could take them forward.
With Small, sleepsy_mouse was doing the same exercise as Kerin and Lottie the day before, controlling the pace over a changed gradient. Sleepsy_mouse was tending to focus too much on Small and not on where they were going. Steve observed that a short focus can slow things down a little, so it's quite possible that she has started to do that as a result of Small's tendency to accellerate as a response to more or less any cue. They worked on the same exercise as Kerin and Lottie the day before, which Parelli taught as "the Sugarfoot Jog" but for some reason everyone on this clinic remembered as "Fancy Fairy Feet" and so it will presumably be known from now on. With this pair an important element was to stay focussed at least a quarter of a circle ahead at all times. The figure eight, with it's change of rein in the middle, is a great way of keeping things varied for the horse in this kind of exercise.
A slightly fuzzy shot, but I've finally got a picture that shows how big Small's stride is in trot.
On the rampage again!
Working with softness, Steve observed that to keep softness you have to understand how you got it in the first place. Sometimes there are shortcuts but before we can start breaking the rules we have to know what they are.
Karen French, Silversand Associate and Alexander Technique Instructor, helps Lin with her position. Sgt Wilson, Clinic Cat, helps by looking quizzical.
After a while in the field, everyone was very happy with what they had got and so we headed off en-masse to the area outside the corner of the field, where there were some banks that we could use to work on going up and down hill. The trick here was to get the horse to control the speed with their hind feet and their direction with the front. We would set off carefully down the bank and the moment we felt the horse starting to hollow their back away and support themselves on their forehand we would stop and start to back up until they were back in a good shape and then set off again until they are working carefully whenever you ask them to go downhill.
Some of the horses found this really difficult- Rosie needed quite a while of gentle encouragement from Steve before she could handle being asked to back up on the slope at all.
Small, physically adept at the best of times, was a natural at this.
Lottie doing the Fancy Fairy Feet exercise.
Lottie gets a big hug, looks impressed with it.
Steve shows me how to tie the mecate.
Ferrum!
In the afternoon, I was having trouble getting Zorro straight - he constantly wants to bend one way or another - and Steve suggested I try using the fence to give us at least one straight side, but it turned out that the fence itself was pretty scary and the corner of the fence at the bottom of the field was downright terrifying. In the end Steve came with me and helped us get to that corner, which ended up doing a bit of advance and retreat to get nearer to it and then when Zorro couldn't face it at all, carefully backing up into the corner. Steve just stayed in front of me and showed me where straight was, which was essential as Zorro was wiggling around like an eel trying to avoid going into the Empty Corner Of TERROR which he regarded as entirely full of angry lions hungry for tasty black cob. We got there for a moment and then used the amount of energy that we had built up to have a really stomping trot back up to the top of the field, where it really felt like my little round cob was really a flouncy andalucian...
(Note Steve in the background, knackered after having just run up the hill with us.)
We went down to the banks to do some work on the hills - riding downhill is something I have always found quite scary, but it was much easier on my injured leg getting across the rough and bumpy ground to the banks on horseback than it had been in the morning trying to carry a chair. Once again the three horses were quite different- Namara kept things in her calm stride, Lottie could not handle more than standing on the flat, taking a couple of steps of backup onto the hill and coming back down, and Zorro looked after me very well and did a good job at being well behaved right up until I asked him to go down the longest bank, which he obviously disapproved of giving a big buck and a squeal before realising we were actually at the top of a tall bank and really there wasn't anywhere to go that didn't involve a lot of downhill and calmly allowing me to guide him back down the easy way.
Down a steep bank. Am I holding on to the front of my saddle there? Totally. Never mind precise control, I just wanted to get down that alive. Also it was much steeper than it looks in the picture, honest.
I feel like this report is woefully incomplete- there were so many significant things going on that I have missed- Lottie's beautiful dressage horse stylings on monday afternoon, the amazing potential Ferrum showed throughout ( Ferrum and Camilla have hardly had a mention ) and everyone had moments of brilliance and took valuable steps on their own journeys. It is a real pleasure to be part of such a dedicated and thoughtful group of students with such beautiful and charming horses.
x-post with horsemanship