Cob Jockey

This is pretty much stream of consciousness about my Saturday lesson, but there's no way I could shorten this.  In fact, I really feel like I needed to write it down so I had to think about it a second time.

While I was gallivanting around Texas last weekend, my trainer was auditing a Jean Luc Cornille clinic in Lexington, and came back bursting with ideas that would clarify concepts we were already working on.  She said she pretty much dragged a couple of other students to it, and I would have been dragged too if I hadn't been away.

His "THE SNOW IS SLIDING OFF THE ROOF!" face.

At my lesson today, she did one of the exercises with me, and without having seen the clinic I have to describe JLC as "biomechanics with an MRI machine nearby"  (Not literally.)  JLC's website describes it like so:

The authority-pleasing, question-suppressing, rule-following approach is wasting the athletic abilities of talented horses and gifted riders. Modern science exposes the horse’s vertebral column structure and function in details previously unknown. With this knowledge in mind, the rider’s feeling can lead the horse’s education toward unprecedented achievements.

She spent about 10 minutes talking in the beginning, and I am not sure I fully grasp it all yet even though I rode it and it made a big difference in the way Connor went.  Basically, she talked about getting the horse to carry his weight evenly distributed and off the forehand, and how the ribcage relates to that.  Even if a horse is bent in the correct direction, his ribcage can still be out of alignment on multiple different planes, and that makes him unable to use his back correctly, really carry himself, or shift his weight back.

The main road to the barn is closed because they're replacing a bridge along the route, so I have to cross this scary freakin metal bridge to get there for the next 6 months or so.

Our entire lesson was spent at the walk.  At a very slow walk, because she wanted both he and I to have time to think about our mistakes and our successes.  And when I mean very slow walk, I mean hardly moving, with Connor deliberately thinking (and he was really thinking) about where to place each foot.  This was really hard for him, given his tendency to rush.

So I was:
- Keeping the walk very slow but still engaged
- Keeping my core very still and tall
- Using the upper inside of my inside thigh toward his wither to ask for the correct bend
- Not using my lower leg unless I needed to make a big correction
- Keeping him in shoulder in the whole time

Not only was it really hard to slow him down (we only got as slow as she wanted maybe twice - and when we did, I knew it was right because I could hardly feel his footfalls), it was also really hard to keep all his body parts in line.  As soon as I got the ribcage, he'd swing his hindquarters out.  She actually got on him at the end to feel what I was feeling, and she said that I was slowing his front legs down, but the hind legs kept going pretty quickly, so all that energy had to go somewhere and therefore it went sideways.  I have to slow down every single leg, not just two.

"Please stop writing...please?  This post is long enough."

The amazing thing was, even though we only got a step or two here and there of really doing that exercise right, Connor went amazingly well.  Steady in the bridle (the Micklem/loose ring) and REALLY concentrating on what we were asking.  In fact, he was concentrating so hard that when the piles of snow on the roof started to melt and slide off while my trainer was riding, he only gave it the hairy eyeball.

"Wow," I told her, "If you didn't have his brain where it is now, you would have been on the other side of the arena."  She agreed and said, "This exercise is honestly more about his brain than his body.  He needs to make mistakes, but slowly, and understand why they are mistakes and how to fix them.  He can't do that if he's rushing around."

It's warm, so pony doesn't have to wear a hood anymore and the Great Mane Pull is beginning this week.  He gets to look super manly in these training braids for a few days, because I am NOT letting that mane flop back over!

When she really got him straight and aligned, his whole topline changed.  His throatlatch relaxed, his poll was lifted, he was on the bit, his underneck muscle disappeared, and he looked round.  When he was tense and not aligned, you could see the change immediately.

I am in Indy all week for work training, staying in a hotel, which means I'm pretty far from home but only 30 minutes from the barn, so I am taking all of my makeup lessons at once this week.  I'm excited to be doing that now, with these new concepts to work on.