Re: RC: drop those stirrups!

[Abby Bloxsom <goneriding@snet.net>]

Okay, so I'm a little late getting into most of these, but I hope I have
some pertinent thoughts, better late than never -

Amanda Perez wrote:
> 
>   Cy is barefoot, so while waiting for his feet to grow, I am
> limited to pasture-riding.  
<snip>
> The real eye-opener, though,
> came when I decided to drop my stirrups for a while: WOW does
> that make any balance issues you have obvious - the first
> circle I did I nearly fell off, I was so imbalanced!  I really
> had to work at lengthening my inside leg and not 'folding' to
> the inside (I tend to ride turns with my inside hip up, inside
> shoulder down).  

So I'll start here.  My favorite approach for teaching lateral symmetry 
(well, teaching just about anything, but it works SO WELL for this) is
for the rider to un-list-ify their approach to riding.  This is a sort
of a Centered Riding thing.  I'm not certified in CR, but I've had a bit
of it and use some of the techniques in my instruction.  The truth is,
you can only think about one thing at a time.  So when you have a list
of 4,385 things to remember when you're on a horse, you can't run
through it fast enough to maintain any kind of consistency in your
riding.  That is, if you're thinking "hands here, shoulders here, eyes
up, legs here, left one back, right rein out,"  etc. etc. you can't
maintain the legs when you're doing the hands & vice versa.

Then you find out you're crooked, so you have to add "right hip down,
left hip forward, right leg long" etc. to your list, and since they're
uncooperative they require more attention so you lose track of what your
eyes & hands are doing.  Then your horse decides to be lazy, so you have
to put some extra energy into keeping him forward, and so on and so on. 

Well, instead of riding by lists, I have my students ride by pictures. 
The first picture is the whole horse and whole rider, all together. 
These will not be perfect, but if they're close enough for what you're
doing, then that's fine.  If they're not, where's the problem?  Is it
balance? Lower body? Upper body? Horse?  For all these things, the
origin of the problem is almost always the pelvis. So that's the next
picture. It's impossible to fix the horse, the balance, the appendages,
ANYTHING, without fixing the pelvis first.  9 times out of 10, that will
cure the problem. 

Examples:  If the legs keep sliding forward, then the pelvis needs to
come forward.  If one leg creeps up and the saddle slides the other way,
then the pelvis needs to go toward the creeping leg.  If one shoulder
collapses, then the pelvis needs to go towards it.  If the horse isn't
carrying himself well or lacks impulsion, if the leg aids are
ineffective, then the pelvis is probably tilted forward or back. If the
horse is stiff, then the pelvis probably is too.  Anything that is done
to the pelvis is radiated out through the limbs and the rest of the
rider's spine.  From there, it's reflected in the horse.

After repositioning the pelvis, the rider takes another picture of
what's happening.  If it's better, then they maintain the pelvis
correction.  If it's not, then they start over.  See? A list of one
thing to remember.  Check, fix, check, maintain.

Now, I realize that there are still 4,384 things that haven't been
checked, but probably 4,300 of them are included in "the big picture",
so you're down to keeping the horse on the rail, making circles round,
not running into the other people in the ring ... much less
complicated.  There are also technical things that you need to know and
work on in your riding to develop & improve your horse's training.  Lots
to do in addition to maintaining a solid and supple center ... but
that's a good place to start.

> Of course it's no big news-flash that riding
> without stirrups is a good exercise - but as a non-competitive
> rider it's easy to give schooling exercises short-shrift (plus
> middle age makes the security of stirrups increasingly
> appealing!).  It's amazing how out-of-kilter you can get and
> not even realize it when you can compensate using the
> stirrups.  

Tell me about it.  I'm in the process of building a career on just that
principle.  Many, many people think that since they don't show they
don't need lessons.  I'm glad to see on RC that this is starting to
change, but I still see a lot of people out there who learned to ride by
the seat of their pants and still do, to the detriment of their horses
and their own bodies.  

(Maybe relevant) story:  The year that I started using Centered Riding
techniques in my teaching I did a 25 mile catch ride one January on a
borrowed horse after probably 3-4 months of not having ridden at all. 
The horse pulled and tugged on me the whole way, and afterward I was
only a very little bit sore in my upper arms - the rest of me felt
great!  The troubles I'd always had in my knees and back were
nonexistent.  Twelve years later, I think I might now be able to keep
the horse slow without sore arms, but I'm not sure ...

Riding well should NOT hurt.

Happy riding to you all.
-Ab
-- 
* * *
Abby Bloxsom
ARICP Certified Instructor
Level III Recreational and Distance Riding
Colebrook, CT USA
dearab@horsecom.net
goneriding@snet.net