I mean, I knew that before, but I thought I had mine at an okay height. Today, my instructor had me raise my hands quite a bit above my default position, and I found it made a big difference when it came to doing what she wants me to do with my shoulders (that is, getting them back and getting them relaxed).

I am not sure if she noticed it because I was decided to try Murphy without the help reins (actually, I forgot them, but I had been thinking about skipping them since during my last private lesson I rode without them and she suggested they may have been hampering me), and that changes his head position and my hand position a bit.

We continued to work on circles, and while it was a bit of a struggle at first, I did find I got better results without the help reins. Especially once I got my hands raised up a bit. I feels to me as if Murphy is easier to get into a proper form without the reins, and he also feels more supple. However, the form is less steady, perhaps because he’s so supple.

Once we were done with the warmup, we did the same exercise for most of the lesson, just varying the direction. We’d start by trotting on the long sides and then walking on the short sides, which included a 10 meter circle. Then we’d switch to walking on the long sides and trotting on the short sides and through the circle. Plenty of transitions between straight and curved paths to pay attention to, and transitions between walk and trot (sometimes at the same time as the straight to curved or vice versa transitions). Just the thing to make Murphy nice and supple, and towards the end he was getting kind of liquid.

So, now I have another body part that I need to get used to having in a different position. I’ll have to be careful not to overdo it, though.

Anyway, with that out of my system, what about the lesson? Well, no Olympic-level jumping for us, that’s for sure. Or dressage, for that matter.

Either way, what matters right now is that my lessons for this autumn got off to a great start on Murphy. Whom, btw, seemed very happy to see me and seemed to be in quite a good mood in general. So glad to see he was fine. This was in fact the first time they had had a summer when all horses stayed injury free. Hopefully that won’t lead to a mass of injuries now. :P They did have to put one horse down, Amadeus, but he had been lame for a long while now. Quite young, but also quite large, and he was clearly developing a chronic injury. They also sold one pony who didn’t like it much at the stables, and got another one to replace it.

But before I dive into the lesson on Monday, what did happen last week? Well, I wasn’t alone there, so we had a theory lesson. Horse anatomy, in fact, and Campino and Nikita got painted up with green marker pens to show various bones and angles. I enjoy these sorts of things (the anatomy, not putting green marks on horses), and it fit in well with my homework about dog anatomy for the show training class I have been attending for a few Thursdays (the last one was this week), though I am not very good at it so far. I imagine it takes a lot of practice to get an eye for what is or isn’t a good angle, for example.

So, why am I posting now, then? To catch up on last week’s lesson, of course. ;P

I ended up on Gamir, and since the paddock was incredibly dry and dusty, we rode indoors. It wasn’t too hot, actually, but hot enough that Gamir started out soft and limber from the get-go. That was quite different from how he tends to be in winter. We warmed up mostly on our own, so we didn’t get a lot of feedback right then, but it felt to me as if he moved with a longer strider rather than a quicker stride when asked to move forward a bit more. Keeping my mind on the difference is, slowly but surely, making me more aware of what exactly is happening.

The lesson itself focused on working towards a half-pass, though we started out just doing a leg-yield with the neck flexion in the direction of movement as opposed to away from the direction of movement. We then added the bend of the horses body once we were able to get good sideways movement while retaining the neck flexion. At a walk, I was able to more or less sort this out. Gamir is well-schooled and finds moving sideways pretty easy, though maintaining the flexion and the right amount of forward movement takes a bit more work. At a trot, it did not go so well. These sort of exercises demand a lot from my own body control and co-ordination, and I pretty much twist myself into a pretzel trying to do it at a trot.

I was pretty pleased with the start of the lesson, not the least because I felt as if I had a better grasp on how Gamir was moving, but I need to work a lot on my co-ordination. I suspect that if I wasn’t riding, it would be a lot worse in general, and I should probably get back to taking dancing lessons to work on it outside of the riding.

I was put on Gamir instead of Murphy this time, and given that we ended up focusing on a lot of canter work I suspect that was a rather purposeful shift. Gamir needs much less help with his canter, so he’s a good horse for me to work on doing less. Which I still need to work on. A lot. ;P I also managed to continue the trend from last week of mistaking a higher stride frequency for a longer stride when working on varying the tempo, both during the warm-up and during the actual canter work.