Cob Jockey

Before my in-person lesson with CGP on Saturday, my head was already spinning with so many new thoughts about riding and biomechanics, and then CGP proceeded to completely blow my mind.

THIS. FEELS. SO. CROOKED.

In the picture above, she had just physically grabbed my left thigh (after asking permission, lol) and yanked it down the saddle while moving my quad muscle behind my leg, then put her hand underneath my left seatbone and asked me to drop my weight down onto her hand. "There," she said. "Now you're straight." "Um don't take this the wrong way, but I don't believe you. I feel like I'm falling off to the left." So she went and got my tripod and took the above photo to prove it to me.

Mary Wanless teachers and touching people, name a more dynamic duo

When we moved onto doing this at the trot, she had me stand in the irons with 75% of my weight over the left side, then go back to sitting or posting. I'm doing that in the below GIF, and while it feels to me like I'm about to fall off of his left side, I'm actually pretty straight.

We also worked on my posting mechanic. It took both of us quite a while to get through to each other on this, but when she said "You're getting to the top of the rise and adding this extra...motion," I suddenly realized what was happening. I was using my glute maxes to lock out my hips like a CrossFit air squat, and it's that lock out motion that causes my leg to swing in the posting trot. You can clearly see it here:

Ingrained movement patterns are hard, yo

She had me think about keeping my hip bones pointing more forward instead of down and shortening the distance from my boobs to my pubic bone by keeping "crunched". And just to complete the CrossFit air squat thing, she also got onto me about sending my hips backward in the post, saying I need to kneel down more than sit back.

A lot of the posting mechanic work ended up being about my shock absorbers. I tend to neutralize my shock absorbers by not allowing my joints to flex in the saddle:

I lose my balance and post once partway through this GIF because I'm not allowing my shock absorbers to absorb his motion. I look still, but it's not a good still.

But it wasn't until she told me to soften the underneath of my foot to allow my arch to also act a shock absorber did things really change. The irony is that I teach a running class at my gym in which we begin our form analysis by jumping with a totally straight leg so they can feel how the shock moves through their body if they neutralize all their shock absorbers, and then jumping while allowing the joints to flex, allowing the arch to act as a spring. But for some reason I had never thought to apply my own lessons in the saddle before.

The last piece of the puzzle Saturday was my left arm. See, (and I have a whole other post on this, lol) Connor loves to toss me onto his right side using diagonal force that goes from the left hind to the right fore. I spent a lot of this lesson learning to identify and fight that, and you can see it clearly in this GIF right as we come alongside the door:

She's not wrong, you can see it in tons of my photos over the years. And sure enough, keeping my left elbow by my side felt like the last piece of the puzzle Saturday.

We didn't work on Connor AT ALL, he was practically a glorified lunge lesson horse, and yet:

Mary was like "What did you DO? I've never seen him move like this before!"

Literally nothing, except fixed my position!

...and bought him a saddle. "None of this would have been possible in any of the other saddles you've had since I've known you," she said. "You are not wrong!" I said.