Lesson With Chemaine - Part 3

This is the last post on this lesson; I promise. Since I don't get to ride with Chemaine very often, she usually loads me up with tons of work which means tons to process. This lesson was no exception.

So far, I've shared two pretty important ideas:

1. A half halt needs as much leg as you use hand. I was able to get a good feel for this while I tried to get a piaffe from Belle, Chemaine's upper level horse.
2. In order to get a canter from Izzy, or simply keep control, I need to reel in his fishtailing haunches. To do this, Chemaine had me open the outside rein, pull it back towards my hip, and send his haunches in with my outside leg. This put him in a counter bend, but it put his shoulders more in line with his butt.

This next video clip shows me figuring out how to get a right lead canter and how to soften my legs so that I don't keep them clamped on. I thought he needed more leg to quit stalling out, but Chemaine pointed out that clamping my legs on is actually slowing him down. D'oh!

Once I felt how much outside rein I needed, the canter was super easy. You can hear from his snorts and see from his head tossing that he liked this canter too.

Screen shot from video ...

Over the past few days, I hope you've been able to get a sense of what type of trainer Chemaine is. I love how she avoids criticizing her riders; Lord knows there's plenty of fodder for that. Instead she focuses on what I am doing right. She also makes things simple and relatively easy to work on by myself once I get back home.

Easy to make him LOOK uphill when you capture just the moment.

While we have a very long journey ahead of us, Chemaine certainly helped me with a lot of little steps. As I watch this final video, I see a much happier and relaxed horse. And all of that came from first regulating his rhythm (last month's lesson focus) and controlling his haunches (this month's focus).

Round and reaching with the hind, but I am very obviously NOT helping.