(Two Steps) Forward and Back

Our other weekend adventure was dressage lesson #3.

We went longer than I’d intended – about six weeks – between lessons but I felt pretty good about it.  Gave me a chance to work on my biomechanics without feeling any self-imposed pressure or judgment about not being perfect yet.  I do nnnnot mean that I think it’s waste for an instructor to keep reminding a rider to fix their position!  That’s part of the job and part of learning; it is a necessity, especially during the phases when the student isn’t able to tell when they’re right and when they’re not.   But I was at the point with a couple of the position tweaks where what I really needed was to spend some time self-correcting and it was really useful and relaxing to be able to do that on my own time.

(Also, we just got mirrors in the indoor and now I can see everything.  Hurrah!  And also: oh, no!)

And apparently it paid off!  At start of lesson #3, I said, “Keeping my toes forward and heels away had gotten way better!  But then I went on vacation and now it’s all over the place again!” and instructor offered reassurance that retraining muscle memory takes time and we went to work – and I didn’t hear about my feet at all during the lesson.  So I guess the notice-and-correct is starting to become a habit, even if the position itself isn’t there yet.

We’d talked previous lesson about weighting the inside stirrup to turn and I’d come up with a question during our solo rides: was I supposed to be stepped down into the stirrup or moving my weight over the new inside leg?  The latter, it turns out, along a certain amount of turn in the torso.  (That is, keeping the rider’s hips aligned with the horse’s and the rider’s shoulder ditto – which is not a new idea to me, but seems much more functional now that I’m riding in less of a desperate pretzel!)

So after the initial warm-up walk and trot, we worked on circles and spiral in/spiral out to investigate that aid.  From there we touched on the leg-yield, initially quarter-line to wall but then quarter-line to quarter-line to take better advantage of the mirrors.  Ridden more forward and straight, Tuck is less inclined to bulge through the shoulder than in previous lives, but tends to step just to his midline rather than cross his legs over – but adding a well-timed whip-tap was really helpful.  I think these should improve nicely now that I can see what’s going on (and thus calibrate my feel)!

Our canter work included smaller circles: 10-12m, reaching forward to pat with the inside hand to test the overall bend and connection.  Going left, all was well.  Tracking right was harder, with Tuck’s nose tending to tip to the outside, almost certainly due to my right-hand dominance and our long history of crookedness.  So we’ll keep working on this, and on the related challenges we ran into schooling forward-and-back in the canter on a large circle.  Forward was good!  A little hesitant at first, but basically good.  Back was hard, both in terms of the compression (for Tuck) and the coordination of aids without falling into the trap of holding (for meeeeeeee).

Instructor liked that Tuck reacted to the challenge by getting a little spicy and continuing to try, though.  He’s not the sort to touch his limit and shut down as a result and I really appreciate it when folks appreciate that about him.  He has an awfully high opinion of himself – but so do I, so it works out okay.