Sunday I took two students up to RDLA for a good old fashioned cross country schooling and when we got in the truck, tired and hot and thirsty, I turned to the girls and said, "Would you like to stop for lunch, or do you want to skibble on home?"
The unanimous response was something along the lines of "what on Earth does 'skibble' mean?"
The answer: nothing. But it's a phrase my mom used a lot with me when I was a kid, so I sort of assumed it had roots in slang.... somewhere. It doesn't.
I took an extremely unscientific poll, and received the following definitions:
Drooling
A brief fight
A part of a turkey
To waffle
To skip a pebble
To run (my sister's definition)
To fall
It describes the weird state of being that halfway between a walk and a run. Like when you know you should be running but can't bring yourself to do it so you walk uncomfortably
When I ask you to imagine a lily, what do you see?
Do you see a flower?
What color was your original flower?
What about Lily Potter?
My point is that unclear definitions and fuzzy understandings of words can cause confusion and tension in the training ring. If your trainer has told you to bend the horse a hundred times, sometimes you aren't confident you should even ask how she wants you to do that. After all, you've been riding forever, and bend is a simple concept! Right?
And some definitions necessarily change as time goes on and can be relational to the horses you ride. How balanced is "balanced" or how steady in the bridle "steady" is.
Here's one of the massive kickers of learning to ride: our instructors tell us things through words. And so our left brains get a hold of those words and try to translate them to the right brain.
Sometimes our left brain does a great job at this, and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes our instructors get really good at helping our right brain a lot (like when Dumbledore told me to pop a balloon between my thighs, or suggested I imagine my ponytail tied to my horse's hindquarters, or when Megan wrote about being a brighter lightbulb).
But sometimes our instructors are not good at this. And I would argue that it is our responsibility to ourselves and to our horses to be sure we've all got the same understanding of nebulous phrases like "through" and "collected". Team to team those definitions might change a lot, but you've got to be certain you know what those words really mean.
Andrea Waldo has written a really lovely sports psychology book just for us horse people. Brain Training for Riders is in three parts: the first is about the basics of fear and our psychology, the second is about taking this information to improve our performance, and the third is about overcoming deeper fears or recovering from bad accidents.
Now, as anyone who knows me will realize: I read a lot. I read broadly. There's nothing in this book that I haven't read elsewhere, but if you're somewhat new to sports psychology and ESPECIALLY new to the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy as a method of improving your sports performance, then this book is a MUST. This book is densely packed with actionable, important information. After all, as Yogi Berra said, "Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical," but I really think he misspoke and intended to say horseback riding. Due to its density and especially due to the fact that the whole thing is written about my sport (duh) I had a lot of good thoughts about it and you all helped me with the first one. Yesterday I asked you to give me ten skills you have as a rider. I can't know how much thinking or pondering it took, and I also can't know how hard it was. Most of you reached ten skills. But 4/6 of you made some hedging comment as you added the comment, and another person reached out to me off the blogosphere to ask what I intended with this question. I'm going to quote Waldo directly on this one, "Riders who lack confidence... don't recognize their abilities, so they can't possibly have confidence in them. And when they don't have confidence in their abilities, they ride as if they don't have those abilities." Later, she writes, "Many students tell me they're not good at a skill because they don't do it perfectly, or someone else does it better than they do. This misses the point. You don't have to be perfect at something to know how to do it, and you don't have to be the best to be good at it." I loved reading what you guys had as skills, and I love knowing that there are so many thoughtful things you're willing to own and rely on in your riding. But enough on that! Here are two things I took from the book that I'm going to try to implement yesterday:
1) When seized by fear, or when I see a student frozen, I'm going to ask these questions --
What skills, abilities, or knowledge do I have that will make the worst-case outcome unlikely?
What will I do to prevent the situation from happening?
If the problem starts to occur, what will I do to solve it?
This methodical examination of something fear-causing (let's say a horse is rushing a fence, or perhaps even trotting too fast) will both provide the lower brain with a PLAN to avoid the worst case scenario, and reestablish the frontal cortex's control over thought patterns.
2) I'm going to start practicing single-point focus, and I'm going to make my students do it too. I'll not copy the whole section, but I will summarize --
Making sure you're safe and your horse is calm, pick something to focus 100% of your energy on. For example, holding the reins. Focus on the sensation, on the amount of pressure you feel, the way your fingers curl around the reins. For one full minute, focus entirely on your hands on the reins. If your attention goes to the arena fence or a flickering light or a deer in the distance, bring it back to the sensation of the reins in your hands. Eventually, after daily practice of 2-4 minutes on different parts of you (your seat bones, your feet in the stirrups, your thighs, your sternum, your core) then try it at the trot or the canter.
There's a lot to unpack in this book and I'm sure I'll be writing about more of it as I implement it.
Kat has been on stall rest while we try to minimize damage to her fetlock wound - it's a very tricky place to have an injury, I'm learning.
Sunday I wanted to bring Kat down to the main barn to groom her a bit and spend some time with her, but she barely agreed to come out of her stall. She was holding her right front up and hobbling over it. I decided that I would soak the foot, liniment the leg, and see what Monday brought around. I inspected the leg, I ran my fingers over every crevice and couldn't find anything wrong, but the mare was clearly unhappy.
She was lethargic and dull Monday morning, still avoiding bearing weight on that leg. I ran my fingers over the leg again, pinching and looking for reactivity, feeling for heat, checking her pulse. I called the vet, was told it'd be a few hours, and proceeded to manufacture worst-case scenarios until he showed up.
What if she needed an extended rehab? Would I be able to execute a proper rehab out of my farm? Do I have the facilities, the time, the control? Could I afford to send her to a center designed for rehabilitation? How would we keep her brain from leaking out between her ears?
When I led her down to meet the vet and she hopped over the leg, three-legged lame, he said, "Why, how did you even tell she was lame?" It was that comment that broke my anxiety a bit, and when he pulled the shoe to dig the hoof out, he found a pretty hefty abscess.
Jeez! All that panic for something that will resolve as the abscess drains and she heals up.
I taught a lesson yesterday to a pretty darn adorable kid - sweet, talkative, willing to take instruction. She was quite small and it was her first time on a horse, so I kept Chente on the lead and just walked around with him while we talked about where to put your foot on the stirrup, did some stretching, and talked about favorite ice creams (hers was chocolate).
And then, near the end, I asked if she wanted to trot a bit. She nodded and I urged Chente up to a trot while I held the girl's leg.
It started as a muffled giggle but erupted into belly laughs within a few strides. Her face was radiant, and the laughter so contagious I found myself giggling while jogging along.
And that's how, out of breath from running and laughing, I welcomed the girl into the world of loving horses.
Tango went to Tracey's for his second lesson yesterday and was an absolute saint. I'm loving the opportunity to learn a bit more with him even though I think I'd still rather be bringing Kat to these lessons. She'll be back in action in no time, I'm sure.
I don't really have any media, so here's a (long) video from my last lesson with Tango/Tracey wherein for the first time I feel like I look really good at the canter. Just skip to about a minute or two in and tell yourself, damn, that's a decent thoroughbred hahahah
Here's what I learned in this lesson:
-Keeping your hands behind the bit rings helps you to guide the horse to straightness from your seat
I tend to let my right hand come over the neck when I'm tracking left, and then when I get the right hand where I want it, my left hand sneaks up to the withers. I think I'm asking for more bend, but the correct thing is to shorten the rein so that a small movement to the inside of the circle takes a feel on his mouth.
If the rein is too long and I have to move my hand backwards, I'm going to change the balance and be less able to influence his straightness with my thighs and lower leg. I need to keep my reins shorter without thinking I need to post over them, I can keep my upper body away from my hands.
If the hands are over the middle of the horse, then all I'm doing is encouraging a twisted neck which does NOT allow the energy to come forward over his back and through the deep muscles of his neck.
-If you over-open your inside rein to help show the horse the bend you want, you can't just snap it back to central, be gentle
Tracey had me first ask for bend with my inside leg and a slight matching hold on the inside rein, but if that didn't work I moved the rein toward the center of the circle a few inches (without allowing the outside rein to follow the hand over the withers). Every time he really gave to me, lifted his withers and bent to the circle, I'd snap my hand back to 'home' and he'd sort of fall out off the circle because I wasn't careful in putting myself back to central.
I also need to keep my reins shorter in order to facilitate this more soft movement between over-showing the horse and riding in a more correct place.
-Ask for a bit more than the horse wants to give you, because you're not building muscle unless you're working against resistance
Now this was damn near philosophical. I'm paraphrasing, but essentially she said, "we build strength by working against a bit of resistance. If you're in the gym and the weights are too light, you won't be building muscle. If you're just going along the way you like to go along, it might be nice, but it's never going to change anything."
This is the Thoroughbred in question, in case you've forgotten in this wall of text
-Timing in the transitions is key if you want to maintain roundness
This is related to a more overall reactivity I apparently have when I'm riding. If you sort of wait until a problem has already happened, it's harder for the horse to understand you don't want them to do it. We did about fifteen thousand walk trot walk trot transitions all in the sitting trot in this lesson, and you have to stay really focused and feeling in order to ask them to do these transitions correctly.
As in: a round, soft, carrying transition doesn't just happen with repetitions willy-nilly, you have to sort of show the horse how you want it done, then do it that way a bajillion times until it becomes either more natural for your mind to explode when you do something you've literally done since your third riding lesson or the horse starts to create the new habit.
-To better sit the trot, carry your bear-down deeper into your pelvis
I consider myself a pretty fit person, I ride a lot, I should theoretically be pretty riding-fit.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WHAT A JOKE SERIOUSLY
But in all seriousness, it's very easy to get a bit sloppy when you've got four more horses to ride in a day. You sort of conserve yourself - but then you start to coast, and you need to work against some resistance to improve, and if I am able to reach the end of the day not really feeling terribly physically exhausted, I'm cheating.
So when you cough, or clear your throat, or hiss, or growl (go on, try one of the four. I'll wait.) you engage the deeper supporting muscles of the core, but you'll also do a much better job of toning the muscles closer to your ribcage than to your groin. It's human nature.
You have to extend that engagement deep into your pelvic floor (while remaining relaxed) in order to fully support your body in the sitting trot.
And as Tracey pointed out, the horse has to stay round and bending and forward while you focus on this.
-At any point if you leave an aid on for more than five steps you've forgotten what the aid was for (but you can apply an aid once every step for 5+ steps as long as you know what you're trying to do)
-Keep my head up and my ribs down to better feel the horse and remain in vertical balance
-Tango's forehead needs to draw the circle, so I need to bend him and then soften and then ask for the bend long before he comes off the circle
I mentioned this earlier, wherein I'm a bit reactive in my riding and just need to catch the changes when it feels like the muscles are just beginning to think about coming out of where I want him, not when he's already in motion. I also love to draw 20-meter circles full of fishtails, this is related.
-Keep both seat bones on the saddle and your mid-line over the withers in order to help the withers come to vertical
Let's say the horse is leaning to the left. I just picked a direction, it's probably not the direction my horse leans.
If you move to the left in order to better put your leg on the left side, you are only going to increase the leaning situation. But if you sit in a centered way and then remind the horse to come up underneath you, well, that is just going to be so much easier than you'd ever imagined.
(Dammit the problems with my horses remain my fault: why can't I just blame them for being bad?)
-Slow down a lot to allow him to get more clearly cadenced
Tango has a QUITE forward trot (read, quick) that feels pretty decent. He's responsive, he's maneuverable, he's light in the bridle, he's basically round, but there's a trot hiding in that wonderful thoroughbred body that has some real suspension. Not a lot, not world-beating amazing, but it's there. And to get him to build that trot, I cannot push him past it, tempo-wise.
I have to bring him to a much much slower trot without allowing the energy to dissipate (western crossover event horse?) and ask him to be straight and bending and round in that slower trot. And keep my reins short enough to actually use them.
-When the horse is using their body, the base of their neck fills out
Tracey described it like a fire hose that fills up in the base of their neck, and you have to build the tone and engagement in their hindquarters and gently push it forward through their neck without losing balance/tempo/letting your reins get too long
-There is a difference between a moment of strength and a moment of rigidity
We let Tango have quite a long break between cantering one way and cantering the other way, and when I gathered the reins up (but make them shorter Kate honestly you've mentioned the reins thing six times in one blog post) Tango did not really want to come back to play. It was over 90 degrees and he's already sprouting a coat so he was pretty tired. When he flipped up at me I pretty strongly closed my hands and put my inside leg on - get off my legs and yield to the hands.
But I did it too rigidly - and I need to think of remaining fluid in my motions even if the muscle tone has to get really high for a moment.
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