#lateral work

[theclassicalhorse]

Another visual explanation of lateral movements

(X)

[horsesarecreatures]

Leg yields on Amos

[thecatalystcat]

Lucy and me.

[the-eq-exercise]

Five Poles, Five Exercises

This set of exercises works well in a 20×40 arena, allows you to set out one line of poles at the start of the session and not have to change them, and can be ridden over in all paces – perfect for dark schooling nights. As always, you may have to tweak the distances for your horse. An easy way to remember how many steps with the front feet you want between each pole is 3-2-1 (the numbers go down as the pace increases). The poles are 9ft/2.75m/3 paces apart.

Exercise 1: Walk - During your warmup, and whenever you’re letting the horse take breaks on a longer rein, go over the poles in walk. You should get three steps with the front feet between each pole. Ask your horse to walk over in different frames to mix things up – and if your poles are stripy, see if you can do the whole line over one stripe.

Exercise 2: Trot - Now trot over the poles – you should be getting two steps with the front feet between each pole.

Exercise 3: Canter - This is the next step – and it’ll help you get your eye in for a distance as well as making your horse work hard. You should get one step with the front feet between each pole.

Exercise 5: Leg Yield - Leg yielding over poles is an excellent exercise for a horse which wants to ‘cheat’ and not cross through with their hind or tends to fall through the shoulder. The poles force them to really think about where their feet are, and to pick up the shoulder and the hind leg correctly. You can do this one in walk or trot with the poles set at this distance.

Exercise 5: Accuracy - This is the perfect way to practice your accuracy over skinny fences before you start jumping. Come across the school and ride over two of the end poles. You’ll have to ride very straight and be very accurate to get over them both, so don’t be surprised if you miss one to start with!

[itshomolology]

Lesson 5/15/16

So, like, two or three weeks ago, trainer injured herself quite severely on a bike and has been unable to teach since having surgery on Monday. Basically this meant that student teacher was teaching lessons so we worked on lateral work bc she has experience with that and knows what to do.

Personally, I have very little experience with lateral work and have kind of been afraid to teach or use it with Nuno for fear of teaching it wrong. So Nuno knows turns on the forehand and that was about it because trainer has only intermittently worked on leg yields with us. We learned walking turns on the forehand, which Nuno caught onto pretty well. We had to intersperse trot with the work because Nuno would lose forward momentum pretty easily and then in the last half we worked on leg yields. We got a few steps at tail-to-wall and a few steps at parallel, but on the head-to-wall, Nuno just walked herself into the wall. Right now I have a pretty good feel for the walking turns on the forehand, but can’t really feel the leg yields, so those are going to have to be a videoed/supervised thing until I get that. The mental challenge was good for Nuno and the work loosened up her back and made her trot a lot nicer afterwards.

[whichchick]

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to fucking half pass...  (sung to the tune of Sesame Street).  Not really, but... 

Halfpass. Halfpass presupposes that you can gather up your horse for lateral work, set up a degree of bend in your horse and hold it, and also do other stuff like steer and keep a decent rhythm and so forth. Of your horse, halfpass requires more muscle and balance and rock-back-onto-hq-ability than Joe Average Horse has straight out the field. Halfpass sits atop a whole slew of other preliminary skills. It might help you to think of halfpass as "doing a handstand pushup" -- most people can, with a sufficient amount of training and practice, learn to do a handstand pushup but not very many folks can manage it right off the bat. (There are progressive exercises you can download off the internet and do so that you can work your way from "pasture potato" to "handstand pushup-doer" and nobody expects you to get there in a month.)  Halfpass is, for horses, what handstand pushups are for people. They can learn to do it, but it takes careful, structured practice over months so that they can build the muscles and flexibility to get there.

So you still want to get to halfpass.  Start with leg yield -- establish a teensy bend, and then go the other way. Bend horse a teensy bit to the left, like enough to glimpse some eyeball, and then go rightwards. Use your leg-yielding time to practice how much bend you get and gain control of the shoulder so the horse isn't breaking in half and throwing the shoulder over there.  Use this time to work on your feel of the hq -- make sure that they're trucking along and not getting left in the weeds.  Also now is the time for some granularity in your skillz so you can get a little sideways in your leg yield or a lot of sideways in your leg yield. Finesse it up. Leg yield one stride over, go three straight, go one over, make it sharp and clear. Get your "transitions" (from "straight" to "leg yield" and from "leg yield" to "straight") tight and snappy.  Start with walk, but work up to doing leg yield in all three gaits. Make transitions clean and neat, ride without slop in the transmission.  You want a non-horsey observer to be able to see what you are doing out there.  Got all that?  Leg yield too easy? Cool. You can do all the leg yield-y tricks in all permutations and you find leg-yielding both easy and boring? OK. 

Now we do shoulder-in, which is the next step up the lateral work ladder.  Shoulder-in is where you have your horse bent (the front -- neck and shoulders-- of the horse is bent, the hq are straight) but going in a straight line.  Establish bend of front of horse like as if coming off a 10M circle in the corner (of your dressage ring, if you have one) and then just roll that bend on up along the long side of your dressage ring.  Butt of horse should be pretty straight, horse should travel on three tracks going forward in a straight line. Maintain the bend and keep it consistent. You gotta have a bend or you’re just leg yielding, so work on this, and horse should travel on three tracks (a ground observer is helpful here).  

Maintain the rhythm. Hold the shape, don't get stiff in your hips, keep horse trucking along.  Horse should not “shut down” but should maintain free forward movement.  If he starts to shut down, straighten him out and regain forwardness and try again.  Shoulder-in is not a neck-over (most common evasion), so don’t do that.  You also need to learn to feel three tracks or four and fix it when horse gets out of the shape.  Can you, at will, switch between three tracks and four and tell which one you are currently getting?  Are both sides even?  

Obviously you start shoulder-inning at the walk and then progress to trot and canter once he has some understanding of the cues.  Use shoulder-inning to talk to horse with the reins, to get him to understand that you're picking him up for a reason. (This "gathering up the horse" thing is important for shoulder-inning and onward ... you gather up the reins, pick him up into contact, have him right there *with* you ready to do stuff. This is where you get half-halts from, it's a "Yo, horse, we are About To Do A Thing") Get him in the shape. Get very comfortable with shoulder-inning.

Also, once you have a workable shoulder-in on the long side, you need to ditch the corner "prep" thing -- that's training wheels. Get away from the rail and practice in the middle of the ring. Go straight, leg yield, then straighten then shoulder-in. How good is your control? Can you put your horse in SI from E to H? From X to C? How much of that is you getting "organized" or drifting off the line? Is the transition as clear and distinct as a walk-trot transition? Can an observer on the ground who is NOT your coach tell what you are doing up there? Okay, so go from X to C, starting straight in walk, pick up SI in walk, then transition to trot without screwing up the SI... in that distance. Try up the centerline... Straight, SI LEFT, Straight, SI RIGHT, three strides of each in walk and in trot and in canter. How straight is your straight? Is that too easy? You know all the shoulder-innings and can do it at the drop of a hat at any time, in any gait, on a circle to the inside?  On a circle to the outside? You are totally bored with and master of shoulder-inning? No difficulty doing it on your horse, no "do I have it now, coach?" Your shoulder-inning is certain and confident and you have granular control of it and you are precise about it? Awesome. Have a cookie and let's look at haunches-in. 

Haunches-in is the third step of the lateral work ladder. Horse is kinda-straight on the front end and the hq are bent to the inside track WITH BENDING ON THE RIBCAGE. I feel like haunches-in is pretty much "doing shoulder-in except with the butt of the horse instead of with the shoulders". I think it's four tracks these days, but whatever. Might be three. Do some reading for what they're currently looking for in the show ring. Haunches-in is somewhat harder for riders because they can't see it and may have trouble feeling it. It's described as the last step of a smallish circle before you rejoin the rail, where the forehand is on the new line and the hq are still stepped out to the center a bit. 

As with shoulder-in, you start off (in fancypants dressage land) by doing a little prep circle in the corner and then rolling it up the long side.  I generally am walking along, gather the horse up, and do the "horse, move your hq over off my outside leg and kinda bend around my inside leg" body shape until that works while also having "horse please to be having *this* bend" which is a concept carried over from shoulder-inning.  (I don’t have a dressage school to work in, so I’m doing all of this in a hayfield, which makes it a bit tougher but still doable.)  

Anyway, whatever you do, get some haunches-inning working for you.  Manage the degree of bend, make sure horse is even left and right, keep an eye on the outside shoulder (has a tendency to break the bend there), make sure you don’t “drift” to the outside.  All the stuff you can do with shoulder-inning you can also do with haunches-in.  Play with the toy.  Get it working for you in all gaits.

Remember that this stuff is DIFFICULT for your horse and he needs to be building muscles to be able to do this better and longer. Also, his first efforts at all of these lateral movements will kind of suck because he will be a beginner. You need to feel and reward the crappy first efforts and encourage him to keep trying.  (Your first effort at a handstand pushup would be pretty sucky, too, wouldn’t it?)  Be sympathetic and give him the benefit of the doubt, especially in the beginning, because his first efforts are going to suck balls and yet they are what you need to reward to keep him trying.   

Also, note that you do not need PERFECT leg yields to progress to shoulder-in or PERFECT shoulder-in to progress to haunches-in. They should be pretty good, but also I want you to allow time for your horse to build muscle and flexibility.  You can’t make it happen overnight -- physical strength and flexibility takes time -- so might as well USE that time to get better/snappier/moreprecise at your current rung of the lateral work ladder while you’re waiting for him to adapt physically to the demands of the work.  

Once you have a functional haunches-inning working for you (in all three gaits, at will, on demand, without training-wheel prep circles, through transitions and stuff without losing the shape or the quality of the transitions), then you're ready to do the prep work for halfpass. 

Prep work for halfpass: On the long side of your dressage arena, establish a working trot in shoulder-in. Flip it to haunches-in. Flip it back to shoulder-in. Flip it back to haunches-in. YOUR REINS SHOULD NOT MOVE MUCH AT ALL. You keep pretty much the same bend with the neck/head of the horse and it's not a rein business, here. It's a seat/leg business. The flipping is done with your upper thigh/seat. It's very high up. If you're slinging your leg-below-the-knee around on the horse to get from shoulder-in to haunches-in, you are doing it wrong. That is not the locus of control for this movement. You should be able to flip shoulder-in to haunches-in pretty snappy, like an oilcanning movement.  If you take the long side of the arena to get from shoulder-in to haunches-in one time, that is not good enough. You should be able to do several flips along the long side. Try for four -- shoulder-in, haunches-in, shoulder-in, haunches-in. Do not lose rhythm or quality of trot. If that works great for you (awesome!) note what you're feeling about where the seat/thigh is for shoulder-in vs. haunches-in. Note that your outside lower leg (knee/calf) is NOT PARTICULARLY BUSY HOLDING THE SHAPE FOR HAUNCHES-IN because that happens higher up. Note that said lower leg is pretty unoccupied and ready to start shoving the horse in a diagonal motion as for leg yield only now with horse in a new and different and more bent and WAY HARDER (athletically, for the horse) fashion. Assume shape for halfpassing.  It's the haunches-in shape, more or less, with the same amount of bend, only you're not doing this hindquarter-led like a haunches-inning. Halfpass is very slightly shoulder-led, but it's still the bend from haunches-in. Easiest way is to start up the center line in haunches in, then open inside rein slightly (in the direction you want to go) while applying some outside lower leg in a "over, over, over" motion such as you might have used ages ago for leg yielding. Your first efforts will probably not get you to the rail on the first go in a beautiful diagonal line of halfpassing wonderfulness. If you start at centerline and get to quarterline on your first efforts, you are doing well. More likely is that things are going to fall apart after a few steps of halfpassish effort and the bend will fall apart and blah blah. This is OK. Keep at it. Remember how craptacular your first efforts at haunches-in were. Outside rein regulates gathered-up-ness, and forwardness. Inside rein keeps bend, has slight opening to encourage horse to move in. Remember to look where you are going and that it is easier for horse to go towards the rail than away from it. On lateral work, it's taken me about four years (intermittent coaching, self-trained mare) to get from "halfway decent leg yield" to "solid shoulder-in, quite passable haunches-in, can flip from one to the other more than four times along the long side of an arena". We're still working on halfpass... but horse is getting a lot better at holding her lower shapes (shoulder-in, haunches-in) and the quality of the haunches-inning is getting better and more even. It's progress and I figure we'll get there eventually.

[theclassicalhorse]

Dressage Bubs