Monday Fluidity II Finesse Day Six

Well the weekend seemed to fly by and it was back to up at 6am to feed the horses! Remuda with Kristi was quite amusing this morning, everyone seemed to have a funny weekend story to tell so we spent most of the time laughing!y

Today's topic for the classroom with Kathy was Shaping and Balance aka Collection. First question: what does collection mean? Answers varied from balance, a light front end and not scattered. My favourite was 'like a hovercraft' ready to go forwards, backwards, left or right.

Now for the BIG question: how is collection achieved? The answer is to encourage the horse to change it's shape for you - cryptic eh? No really, if you cause the horse to make the desired changes to it's body shape as a response to your requests, then a psychological rather than a mechanical method of achieving collection is possible! Now you can ask it - how do cause the horse to give collection in this way? 1,000,000 transitions in a short space of time (every few strides) - this is basically the yo-yo game.

Now there are 2 key phases to your transitions:

1. Transition: Duck Landings (retarding seat) and
2. Shaping: the Suspension Rein (1 rein lift)
   

It is important that the suspension rein is introduced in the following order of type of transitions:

1. downward transitions (get haunches underneath - power)
   
2. during gait (to shorten a horse that has become long)
3. upward transitions (to create elevation and power)
   

After simulations, both with a partner and then on the seat builders, we had a demonstration in the Big Top with Kathy teaching fellow students Susanna and US Kim, who both did a cracking job of showing their horse's at different stages of collecting. It is always helpful to actually see the technique and the results when applied correctly.

This afternoon I decided that my back was feeling good enough to ride Roget, so I spent time on the ground (1.5 hours), firstly getting him to accept being groomed, then to accept the saddle and lastly to accept me - these left brain extroverts take a lot of energy! As you can imagine, I am shattered and I've only just got on! So we went for an amble, played some fluid rein and some downward transition suspension rein - after all the effort I had put in on the ground to have only 'yes' answers and no brace, it was frustrating that all he offered for about half an hour was brace. Eventually, after trying everything I could think of to avoid giving him something to brace against, we made a lovely soft fluid downward transition, so I got off and called it a day on that good note - hard work or what! Still love him to bits though!