Advanced English Riding. Sharon Biggs
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Название: Advanced English Riding
Автор: Sharon Biggs
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биология
Серия: Horse Illustrated Guide
isbn: 9781937049430
isbn:
Try this exercise. While riding in an enclosed space, pick up the sitting trot, and hold the pommel with your outside hand and the cantle with your inside hand (this turns your body in the direction the horse is moving). Alternatively, you can lace a leather strap or the bottom half of an old drop noseband through the D rings of your pommel to create a “cheater” strap. If your horse is calm, tie the reins in a knot, hold them against the pommel, and let your horse follow the arena wall around. It is very important that you don’t grip with your butt, thighs, or calves. If you grip, you are going to bounce because you will be holding yourself down with the wrong muscles. You must use your upper body to press your seat into the saddle. This means keeping your stomach and back relatively still, without tilting forward and back on the pelvis as people often do. Don’t wiggle your stomach, and don’t arch your back and stick your bottom out behind you. Ideally, exert a steady, constant pressure on your seat bones. This technique takes a long time to develop. As you get better, loosen your grip on the strap to teach your back to stay with the saddle. If your horse is trained to go in side reins, you can also repeat this exercise on the lunge.
This is a good position for the sitting trot.
Here a strap of leather has been laced through the D rings of the saddle’s pommel to create a “cheater” strap.
Bouncing is a common theme in the early stages of the sitting trot; the important thing to know is that when you bounce up you’ll fall back down into the same place. You can catch yourself with your knees if you happen to fall sideways, but then relax your knees again so your sitting bones can fall on the saddle. If the horse’s back is properly relaxed and her neck is down, you won’t hurt her. A horse will object, however, if the rider pulls on the reins as she bounces.
Another reason people bounce is that their shoulders are stiff. Learn to relax your shoulders with this exercise. Holding the pommel with your outside hand, swing your inside arm up and back in rhythmic circles, calmly and with a soft shoulder, in time with the horse’s movement. Switch arms, and when you are comfortable, circle both arms at the same time, grabbing the pommel when necessary. A variation on this exercise is the shoulder shrug: lightly holding the pommel with both hands, shrug your shoulders up, back, and around in circles.
While riding on the lunge, learn to relax your shoulders with arm circles, as demonstrated.
For a good back-strengthening exercise, hold your arm up and stretch it back while riding a sitting trot, as shown.
To strengthen your back, pick up the sitting trot, hold one arm up straight, and stretch it back to tighten the back muscles.
By this time, you should be able to pick up the reins; however, check to be sure you are ready. Put your hands in the rein-holding position with no reins, and see if your hands jump up and down. If they do, you need to relax your elbows and shoulders. You can also learn to stabilize your hand by resting the bottom part of the hand on the pommel as you sit the trot. (Note: the hunter rider sits in a similar dressage position while sitting the trot, rather than leaning forward in a two-point position.)
The Posting Trot
The posting trot is an important skill to perfect, particularly since we use it so much of the time. An improved posting trot will give you steadier hands, better control of your leg aids, and a softer seat.
A hunter or jumper rider should lean forward and post forward and backward. In the posting trot, the rider’s shoulders should be inclined slightly forward, about 30 degrees from vertical. At this angle, you can move with the horse’s motion, which in turn allows your horse to trot out better. Hunter and jumper riders also use the posting trot as a tool to get off the horse’s back and allow her to stretch her neck out and forward.
A dressage rider, on the other hand, should sit over the vertical with shoulders and hips aligned. The thighs should hang as straight as possible; the knees should be slightly bent. The shoulders should never lean forward. The hips should rise out of the saddle and forward over the pommel and land back in the saddle in the same place. In this position, the rider is able to keep her lower leg quietly against the horse’s barrel throughout the phase of the posting trot so she can use it when needed. This position also helps the horse arch her frame and encourage her haunches under.
The hunter/jumper rider posts the trot with the slightly forward body angle shown here, about 30 degrees from the vertical.
The dressage rider posts the trot by rising and sitting over the vertical as shown, with shoulders and hips aligned.
The Canter
To ride the canter, let’s look at lunging once more. Think about the motion of the saddle as your horse canters. It moves in a twisting fashion. Your seat must move in a similar twisting way in balance with your horse. Some instructors may urge you to ride the canter with a forward-and-back motion, the way a child rides a rocking horse. This is a good visual for the beginning stages of your riding career, but you’ll need to add another piece of the puzzle at this stage of your skills. The horse’s leading leg will cause the twist to be canted more to one side than the other. Therefore, your inside hip should twist farther forward than your outside hip. Hold your shoulders still and allow your lower back to be soft and move with your horse.
The Hand Gallop and the Gallop
Hand gallop means the horse is still “in hand,” or controllable. Lengthening the stride and slightly increasing the speed is your goal. The hand gallop is used in lower levels of eventing; the speed at Novice is set at canter speed, 375 mpm (meters per minute, the universal unit of measurement for gait speed), increasing to 450 mpm at Training. Jumpers compete above 375 mpm, so this gait is used frequently in competition. The hand gallop also can be used as a schooling exercise for dressage horses to produce a more forward and expressive canter.
In the canter, the rider’s inside hip twists a bit farther forward than her outside hip, with still shoulders and a soft lower back, as demonstrated here.
The hand gallop and gallop positions are very similar to the jumping, or two-point, position. In this position, you no longer sit in the saddle. You take the seat, your third point of contact, away and ride from the heel up to the knee. Looking up and straight ahead will make you a much softer, much more forward rider. The most important concerns are that your hands are low, that the foundation of the position is in your lower leg, and that you’re not using the horse’s mouth for balance.
Hold the reins in the usual way in the hand gallop. In the gallop, hold your reins in either the half bridge or the full bridge. For the half bridge, stretch one rein across the horse’s neck so that you’re holding two pieces of leather in one hand. For the full bridge, stretch both СКАЧАТЬ