Gratitude

 Mark Rashid talks about gratitude stones - these are small stones you keep in your pocket. The idea is that any time you reach into your pocket - to get money, or keys, or something else from your pocket - you will feel the stone and it will remind you to be grateful for all the things in your life.

Ok so you don't need a stone for this - but how many of us do remember to be thankful for what we do have, rather than griping about what we don't ? The stone is supposed to be a physical reminder of the full part of the glass.

[Just out of interest, the idea of a gratitude stone appears to come from  "the Law of Attraction", from a film called "The Secret"]

What does this have to do with riding ? Mark talked about the first moment when you get onto a horse. For many people there is a moment then when their past experiences come back, and there is a moment of fear. Maybe you wouldn't call it fear - maybe for you it is a moment of apprehension, or concern, or uncertainty.  Whatever it is, Mark commented throughout the clinic I watched that "you get what you present". That can work at so many levels.  But it means that the feeling you have when you very first settle yourself into the saddle - that instant however short - can set the tone for what comes next.

He proposed instead to replace it with a moment of gratitude.

Mark Rashid clinic - day one, afternoon

The afternoon session had four horses in it.

Horse 4 was an older horse (18) who had been off work for a while. (There was no PA at this point so I couldn't hear everything - I think the horse had been off with cushings ?). The mare was now back in work and being aimed at dressage, eventing etc.

The rider asked to work on the stop. The horse was stopping with a lot of tension, bumping into the bit. They worked on feel - Mark suggested the rider *think* about the hand going forward in the halt, but not actually move the hand.

They then worked on the canter transition (up and down). After about half a lap the horse started to really get going. Mark advised asking for trot just before that.

Horse 5 was a youngster being ridden western. He was started last year and was being ridden in a Rockin S snaffle. The rider reported that work out on a hack was fine but it was much harder to, for example, collect the canter in the school. Mark observed that the trot was drifting about quite a lot rather than being straight. He set out four cones to ride a circle around and the trot and focus both improved.

Horse 6 was a big chestnut 8 year old. The rider wants to do dressage with him. She has done a test with him but felt she wasn't getting the same in the warm up arena vs the test.

Mark observed that the rider had quite a lot of movement in her hands. He commented that a to and fro with the rider's hands means that the horse never gets a release and that can result in tension. The more active a rider is with their hands, the more the horse has to compensate. He asked the rider to do less.

Horse 7 was an arab mare. Again it was hard to catch the back story but I believe the horse was being rehabilitated by the current owner. She commented on getting weight back on and getting chiropractic treatments. The rider asked for the mare to be checked before riding to ensure there were no underlying physical issues (own vets have cleared the horse to be ridden). She was worked in the round pen and, although tense, showed no physical issues to prevent her being ridden.

Mark did an interesting ground exercise with a spectator during this session. He asked them to stand still and resist him making them move.

If they had their head and eyes up, they were stable and could resist a "push"
If they had their head and eyes down, they were unstable.
Then head up but eyes down - unstable
Head down, eyes up - stable
and finally (and this is the really interesting one)
Head down, eyes down but think up - the person was stable and resisted a push
Head up, eyes up but think down - and the person was unstable when pushed.

It makes a massive difference if the rider drops head, eye line or isn't thinking ahead/up !

In summary:

I asked my clinic companion what he thought - he said "the key lesson is that you really need to have a pretty good view of what you want to do or the horse will fill in the blanks"

I think another key message was "less is more" (less with the hands, less leaning back, less movement etc)

Clinic Reflections

A number of things triggered this - one was riding my horse today, another was tidying up and finding some old clinic notes from Leslie Desmond and Peggy Cummings.

Mark talks about the figure 8 your hips make, Linda Parelli uses the idea of "pedalling" (a review of the "Secret to Fluidity" DVD says "a “pedaling motion” that allows the rider’s hips and lower back to stay fluid."), and Peggy Cummings teaches a flex/bounce in the thigh.

My Peggy C notes talk about what she called "meet & melt". Mark talks a lot about the quality of the feel in the rein, that the rider needs not to pull back and should offer softness to get it.

My notes from Leslie D talk about how if you repeat drills, you end up with a horse who knows and can repeat the moves without responding to the individual cues. You want the horse to respond/communicate via feel.  Mark used an analogy a few times about not just teaching the horse that "one plus one equals two" as then they don't know how to add up, just that "one plus one equals two".

I like this quote from Leslie: "the fastest way to train a horse is slowly"

Another one from Leslie "the connections that are important are not visible; it is not about the kit".

More from Leslie: horses have a strong drive to be/stay with their person. They will often limit themselves (in terms of energy levels, behaviour etc) to what their person can deal with.

"Control the feet to stop and start, not the mouth." "Don't ride the head, ride the feet."

Now that sounds familiar from watching Mark as well  ;)

This one is pure Leslie - she talked about opening the toe to get the horse to turn its head. And then proved it worked. So that led into canter aids and whether to cue from the rider's outside leg or inside leg. If turning the toe makes the horse turn head and neck, then using the outside leg gives the incorrect bend and makes the correct lead more difficult.

Mark Rashid clinic - footnotes

Transitions: riders tend to think in "words" for gait. The horse doesn't understand that word/picture and it tends to be a static image. Horses seem to respond well to rhythm, so it helps if the rider thinks the beat e.g. 1.2.3.4. in walk (or gallop !), 1.2.1.2 in trot, and 1.2.3.1.2.3. in canter.

To work on canter: set the canter depart up on the short side - start thinking 3-beats as you come into the corner and as you come out of the short side, move your focus to the far end of the school and only then, if they haven't offered already, ask for canter. Normally the horse offers canter fairly early in this process and the rider just needs to let it happen.
 
Mirror Neurons: there was some research done in Italy on primates. They noted that the brain fired up the same way for a monkey that reached out for a peanut AND for the monkey that watched the same activity. Basically this is down to mirror neurons which allow us to feel something that isn't happening to us.

Why sitting trot is harder than sitting walk: most people buy a horse that they can get up on from the ground. That means that leg length is similar for horse and rider and, in walk, stride length is similar. So the rider's hips only need to move as much as they do when the rider walks on the ground. But in trot the horse's stride lengthens and the rider will often struggle to lengthen their hip movement to match it. In canter the stride shortens again and gets faster, and that is easier for the rider to sit.

The rider's hip moves in a figure 8 - that doesn't change in different gaits, just gets faster or slower, bigger or smaller.

From previous clinics:

point to point  get the rider/horse to go "fetch" specific points around the area. "ride like the wind". In an arena you can use letters - but not just the dressage letters, letters on signs etc. Like a game of i-spy "find me something with a letter Y" and so on.

"with most forward movement, the more pressure you use the worse it gets". This is because the leg pressure constricts the ribs so affects both breathing and movement of the horse's barrel - which is needed to allow the hind leg to step through in the movement.

Mark talks often about how the hind leg movement (as it comes off the ground) affects the rider in term's of their hip (the rider's hip will lift and fall as the horse's hip rises and falls) and the leg (as the barrel swings away, the leg swings in with it). But I have an extra note which says that when the rider's shoulder goes back, it is the horse's front leg about to push off.

Notes from a horse being asked to halt but offering canter - Mark asked the rider to ask a little with the inside rein just after the cue. This loads the inside fore so stops the canter strike-off for that instant. He commented that the same thing can be used for horses that offer a lead change when it is not wanted.

So I found this analogy in my notes and I am not sure I have written it down very well, but while I try and think of a way to check it, here it is for the record. Here goes..

If you have a stick and put a block of ice on top, then lift one end of the stick, the block slides off.
If you have a stick and put a bag of rice on top, and lift one end of the stick, the bag flows either side of the stick and you can lift it up.

"it's easier to carry rice".

I read this as being about being soft rather than braced.

Mark Rashid, Sheffield, 2008 (draft)

This is a working draft and will be updated as I make sense of my notes

Softness

Muscles can either contract or relax. To lengthen they need to relax.
There is one ligament running all the way along the back - splitting down each hind leg to attach by the hock.

To "collect" a horse needs to let all the topline muscles lengthen, and engage those along the underneath.

To be able to relax the horse need to soften the neck (poll).

Mark has talked before about softness vs lightness. This time he commented that a light horse will look good when everything is going ok, but will fall apart when its not.

Speed/direction/destination

The rider needs to supply these or the horse will fill in the gaps.

More than one of the riders was working on impulsion. But often they were not asking for a forward moving horse i.e. the horse was giving them something and they were not asking for more. "If you want a faster trot, just ask for it"

Mark used a phrase "waiting for the magic to happen" - i.e. the rider gives an aid and then sits back and waits for something to happen. Instead they need to be engaged/involved in what has been asked for (e.g. a transition).

Mark got the rider to use an escalation where she first "moved air" with her whip, then tapped her own leg (increasing intensity e.g. 1 to 4) and then tapped the horse (starting at intensity 1, and increasing again). As soon as the horse responds, you can stop asking.


consistency
leads to
dependability
leads to
trust
leads to
peace of mind
leads to
softness

contact

contact is not the same as pulling. The rider can apply a certain amount of pressure via the rein (regardles of the length of rein) and can also give it direction.

Many riders seems to associated a short rein with a heavy contact and/or pulling. But the short rein is linked to the length of neck (and the 'frame' the horse is working in) rather than the pressure or direction of pressure.

A big release (e.g. dropping the rein) can be less comforting than a small one where the connection is maintained. (Mark demonstrated this by taking the rider's arm in his hand, and giving a small release, or dropping the arm completely.)

energy

any time there is trauma, whether real or percieved, energy gets stored in the body. That energy needs to be released some how.

At the clinic one of the horses had very high energy levels and could not stand still, and zipped about the whole time. The "perceived" trauma was with his rider, anticipating it all going horribly wrong.

Mark talked about a balance point of energy. Say the balance point is "10" and the rider contributes 5, and the horse 5. Then if the horse's energy spikes upwards to 6 or 7, to maintain the overall balance the rider has to decrease their energy to keep the total at 10.

(Breathing helped to reduce the rider energy level.)

There is also a balance point within the rider (or horse) - where they balance physical and emotional energy. With a horse - if the emotional energy goes up (or down) the physical energy will follow. With people we can sometimes "hide" the physical energy spike and distinguish between the way they feel and the way they act.

With the horse at the clinic who started at very high energy levels, Mark only suggested very small adjustments at each stage. He commented that the horse was only becoming ready for these small adjustments as he calmed down, slowed up. He advised that the rider carry on making only small adjustments.

He had also started the rider using a pattern where she rode along a side but turned half way along it. If the horse sped up, she turned him (quite tightly) til he slowed and then "finished the line". Mark commented it was important to finish the line as it was all about giving the horse a job to do. This was also about setting the "direction" (with speed and destination being adjusted along the way).

One example was that he asked the rider to "tap" the big toe of each foot, inside the boot, in turn. (An alternative would be to move the little finger on each hand - but it is important the horse does not interpret this movement as an "aid"). The toe-tapping resulted in a distinct calming and slowing of the horse. But the toe-tapping was only added in to the mix after the rider had already worked on lwoering her energy level, and on slowing her rate of breathing (from less than 6 steps per inhale/exhale to more than 6).

footfall/transitions

Mark has talked before about "all the paces being available in each pace". This time he connected that idea in to footfall. So the footfall goes

walk is 1-2-3-4
trot is 1-2 1-2 1-2
canter is 1-2-3 1-2-3

now 1 and 2 are present in every pace, so they are the best ones used for making the transition from one pace to another.

Its November, so it must be Mark Rashid time

Ho hum, what better time of year to spend sitting in an indoor school for 8 hours a day than....

freezing November !

Anyway, I now have a tonne of notes to write up. I travelled back from the clinic Saturday so only had one day to ride this weekend. (and the weekdays are too dark at this time of year, the horses are in by 4pm).

One of the things Mark talked about was the "figure 8" of movement in the rider's hips as they rode. Of course this is about the *movement* not about the physical hip joint, as the left side of the hip could not suddenly end up on the right with the person still facing the same way and not in agony !

But what was described was a looping flow of movement/energy from side to side. In all dimensions, not just in one plane.

He also talked about how the rider mirrors the horse's movement. In walk, the stride length is pretty close for both a walking human and a horse. And walking at that stride length is something we humans "practice" (do) all the time. Which explains why sitting a walk comfortably is rarely a problem.

But as we go up the gaits, the stride length increases. And we humans rarely practice moving at that longer stride length. Even if we don't actually have to "walk" on the horse as they trot, we do have to be able to absorb that movement in our hips.

As my mare has DJD and this sometimes affects her movement, I was thinking about this as I rode today. Effectively I could monitor how she was by being aware of that figure 8 and how it was moving. (One of the triggers to getting her diagnosed was that she was not moving the rider's hips other than in the vertical plane).

And then later, after riding, I went for a short run (18 mins). And I got to thinking that actually when you run you DO have a longer stride length. So if you run with correct posture, you ARE practicing that longer stride. Does that mean I am improving my sitting trot by running ? I guess it is difficult to isolate that aspect as the shear improvement in fitness and (hopefully) reduced weight will also help with sitting trot.

And then, as I ran along, I suddenly became aware that the same figure 8 was working in my hips; I could feel the change from one loop to the next. All of a sudden all I could think about was the figure 8 ! When I got to the end of the run and went back to walk, the figure 8 kept going...

spooky ;)