Last week I spoke about being able to halt without using the rein aids, or at least having the as an aim as we ride. This week I'm going to expand on this with a thought of what is your ideal aid for everything that you do?
When you imagine the best ride of your life, how much pressure are you applying to communicate with your horse, are you even using pressure in this image or is it from your voice, or breath?
Can you sit and close your eyes, and really dial into what it would be like to ride with less?
I know for some this can seem really hard, because your horse has always "needed" a lot of pressure, but as the saying goes they can feel a fly land on them so they can feel the lightest of touch, just because your horse as always felt like they needed it doesn't mean that this is exactly true. Maybe they've only been trained or ridden with reasonably high pressure? Maybe they've never has the consistent chance to demonstrate they can work off less? Maybe they are already bracing before the pressure is applied so therefore to break through the brace more is needed.
But what if, just what f we changed the narrative for this? What about less? And how much less?
Ok, so just stating this and sending you away with this is unfair, I've learnt through my own experience of life that using less requires more from us that just saying I will use less, for it to really work we need to change a few things first.
Lets look at the reasons why more pressure is used so readily...
We live in a society that has a propensity to always do more, when something isn't working the vernal answer in our world is more, buy more, work more, study more, be more, and so this carries into our horse training and riding too, more aid, more energy, more effort. In order to respond by doing less, we need a mindset change in vernal for it to become our go to place, what does it feel like to do less when things get challenging, in life and riding? What does it feel like to take a beet and instead of responding by more, stopping and thinking about what may be creating the issue? Just the thought of slowing down a process to some popped can feel really uncomfortable, but this is the start of us using less pressure as an equestrian world.
Awareness of our response, have you ever watched a video back of yourself riding and thought, I didn't think my hands moved that much or my legs swung that much? This is so common, what we "think" our body is doing to what is actually happening comes down to proprioception or awareness of our body, to be able to use more subtle aids means that we need to be highly aware of our body to be able to instruct for those subtle aids, this requires a few things to happen, we cannot be stressed or nervous, any attempt to be fully body aware whilst living in our sympathetic state will make it impossible as part of the nervous system response is to dull down our body awareness, this is survival mode, and so being less aware helps us stay alive. Full body awareness only occurs when we are in our para-sympathetic state, where our brain and body are completely listening to one another, so rushing, busy, quick, emotional pressure, illness, physical stress all make being more aware hard. In order to ride with more feel, more awareness and less pressure we need to sort out our nervous system state.
Body control, along side the awareness then comes the strength and mobility to be able to control what our body is doing. If we want to use less pressure we need to have a very clear request for our horse, a request that doesn't muddle them or make them have to work out which bits to listen to and which bits to ignore. If you are asking for a walk on and your hips are tight and stiff they are saying stop, this means your horse has to work out, does she mean stop or go, in order for you to get them to understand your request your legs need to be louder than your hips, this equals more pressure....BUT what if you freed your hips up so they also said go, then your horse wouldn't have to work out what to ignore and could just respond to the request, this equals a lot less pressure. In order to be able to do this with all of our riding having good range of movement, good strength and good proprioception is key. You won't be able to do less if you are giving your horse multiple inputs without knowing.
As you can see us riding with less pressure, less force, less discomfort for our horses takes not only a statement of "do less" but also an understanding of what is happening to create the "do more" mindset.
Lets go back to the image you had of the perfect ride, how you feel inside your body, how your horse responds to your requests, what do you need to do away from your horse to get to this state? Lets then have a ponder on how we can achieve this when we ride.
Happy Playing
.jpg)
תגובות