Beginner riding tips: Cantering edition

After a long period of off-and-on riding, I have recently started doing cantering work. Somehow, when you're moving at a different gait at a slightly faster speed, all that you have learned in the trot goes out the window, at least for me.

This post is mostly a collection of tips (and admonishments) for myself to read over, so that I hopefully remember them when moving fast.

1. Keep your leg long. The joints in your legs act as shock-absorbers and sitting the canter is way harder when these joints are locked tight! Plus, you keep losing your stirrup that way. 
2. Outside cue is not just the leg, but the seat and body. The leg moving back should come from naturally from the change in your seat. Your torso should reflect this change by the outside shoulder moving back.
3. Sit tall and keep the core engaged. You tend to hunch over when things don't go your way and you get nervous. This only makes things worse by negatively affecting your balance! Sit tall by keeping the core engaged.
4. Remember, nothing good happens unless your horse is thinking forward. 

Beginner riding tips #3: Crookedness in your body and how it affects your riding

We are all crooked in small ways.

For example, I'm right-handed. If you practice yoga, you might notice that it's harder for you to bend in one direction than another.

Normally, these are invisible in our daily lives, but when you ride, all of our flaws come rushing to the fore. Some of the effects are easy to notice immediately; when we first swing onto a horse, our stirrups tend to feel uneven for a few minutes. But what about all the myriad other unevenness in our bodies? How can we correct for our problems if we are unaware of them?

Inspired after reading "Balance in Movement," I have been carefully monitoring my body over the past several weeks and matching it up with problems I experienced in the saddle. I'm fairly confident in the resulting observations, so I wanted to share some tips in hopes that they will help in a small way. 

Hands

This is an easy one. You tend to write/brush your teeth/do everything with one hand. This tends to make your dominant hand the stronger of the two and consequently, you pull on the rein harder with your dominant hand.

Leaning

When standing, people rarely stand with their weight square, i.e. evenly distributed over both feet. We lean on one foot or another. (I tend to lean on my right foot most of the time.) This carries over to the saddle and you tend have more weight on the seat bone that you lean towards.

Legs

This was was hardest for me to notice, despite the help of my instructor. Early on, she noted that my right heel tends to creep up more than my left. I nodded and moved on. What I didn't realize until recently was that my right leg is weaker than my left in general. Giving a leg aid for turning right takes significantly more thought and effort for me than turning left. I corroborated this feeling with physical evidence: the wear marks on my half chaps. There were stronger wear marks on my left half chap than my right.

Final Thoughts

Beyond the three tips mentioned in this post, another great way for riders to notice unevenness would be through a body-introspective activity like yoga or pilates. These exercises also help you build core strength which is key for good riding!

In terms what to do about the crookedness, the book mentioned earlier in the post, Balance in Movement, has great list of exercises. Other than that, just knowing your enemy is half the battle, right?

Beginner riding tips: #2 Ignore your instincts

Today's bite-sized tip is brought to you by my first panic moment on saddle.

My regular partner in schooling is the type of horse that falls back to a walk at the slightest hint of "whoa", so I never realized that I was tensing my leg while giving the downward transition cue. So when in my recent lesson I was paired instead with Seymour, who likes to trot, trouble ensued. At my instructor's behest, I tried to transition from a trot to a walk, but instead Seymour happily sped up his trot.

My fore-brain went blank.

The animal instincts of my hind brain immediately screamed at me to hang on by raising my knees and leaning forward (losing seat contact), squeezing my legs (asking Seymour to go even faster), and tensing and raising my hands (losing rein contact).

Folks, seriously, ignore your hind-brain instincts. They suck at riding horses.

As for me, after a few seconds (of my instructor's desperate shouting) the more sensible part of my brain came back online and I eventually slowed to a walk. Oh yeah, and I don't do the leg tensing thing anymore.

Beginner riding tips: #1 Stop looking down!

This is the first in a series of posts I plan to make on short, bite-sized riding advice that improved my riding.

Stop looking down!

One of the easiest mistakes to make for a beginner while riding is to look down at the horse.

You may already know why looking down is bad. When you look down, your head, which is a very heavy part of your body, moves forward and upsets your balance. You either begin to slouch or you subtly shift your weight forward off of your seat bones to compensate. Either way, you lose contact with the horse through your seat. Your desires are communicated less clearly the horse becomes unsure and less confident.

I had an instructor tell me that "He's not going to turn purple!" and "Stop looking down!" a million times during one lesson. However, the temptation is very strong! Half of it is marvelling at this immensely powerful animal that is (sort of) doing as you bid and rest is trying to figure out why this immensely powerful animal is only sort of doing what you want him to. (Well, unfortunately, looking down isn't helping.) Despite my instructor's exasperation, I couldn't stop!

The thing that actually changed my desire to look down was learning when it was appropriate to look down. First is to make sure that you are on the right diagonal when posting to a trot or the right lead when you're cantering. Second is to check that your horse is not overly flexed in the neck during a lateral movement. That's it! If you're not doing that, you have no excuse to look down.

So stop looking down, he's not going to turn purple on you, I promise. :)