Now, as we prepare to trade a long flex for a short flex, pick up a close contact with our horse and begin to look at more accurate and refined manoeuvres, it’s important to ensure that our ingredients of respect and impulsion are in place.
As we will discuss in coming articles, successful Contact Riding depends largely on how well prepared we are as a partnership. With your reins very short, your horse engaged and your communications small and precise, every slight movement that your hands and seat make will be felt immediately by your horse through the bit. It’s important now, that you have an independent seat and that you are not bouncing around on your horse’s back and jagging on his mouth. Because of the hinges and phases applied through your reins, rein leathers and bit, every tiny movement your hands make on the reins, travels down to your horse through the bit to his mouth, where every thing is magnified by its sensitivity.
It’s also very important that you no longer need the reins for either balance or brakes; that you can yield you horse well in all six directions, preferably in all gaits; you are starting to be able to feel the feet and what they are doing beneath you; that you both have good impulsion and that your sideways, backwards, hindquarter yields and lateral flexion are all becoming excellent. Your bareback riding and Stick riding from earlier on will have greatly helped in these areas.
If you feel as though you are still not quite in time with each other, take the opportunity now to go back and do some more passenger lessons. Try loosening up all of your body parts at the walk, the trot and the canter. Make sure that you can feel the rhythm of the horse at each of these gaits. If you are going to be influencing the feet through almost imperceptible rein positions in soft feel, it’s important that you are confident in feeling what the feet are doing. All of these ingredients will help make your Contact Riding so much easier and more enjoyable.
In this point in the programme we will have a closer look at footfalls and isolating the feet, soft and subtle rein positions, weight shifts at the halt, rocking your horse, regulations of gait and beginning lateral movements ... all with soft feel. We will also discover how Soft Feel and vertical flexion can be obtained naturally and easily ... in fact, your horse will offer it to you! Look out for the article entitled Natural Flexion.
To help your horse stay interested and confident during these formative Contact Riding stages, we have added in purposeful tasks to do whilst in soft feel. In the last lesson we looked at dragging things and giving your horse a job to do. This helped him to use his strength and power in a positive way, as well as being fun. You might also try kicking around a beach ball while riding or herding chickens; anything that will be a positive experience for your horse.
We hope that you enjoy this part of the programme and the closer connection it will create with your horse. Whatever your sport or equestrian pursuit, a closer communication will afford more accuracy, precision, greater degree of finesse and refinement and ultimately more fluency with your horsemanship skills.
Read More Road To Horsemanship articles.
- By Meredith Ransley, Quantum Savvy.