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Categories: everyday life, 538 words1 feedback • PermalinkIt is now the new year, and I am back home supposedly recovering from my trip to the USA. However, there is so much going on that I am struggling to wrap my brain around it all.
The trip was very enjoyable, with some particularly interesting teaching that led to a few insights that I think will bear fruit for us all. It became so clear to me exactly why some of the people I know who have struggled the most have always found riding so difficult. They had a particularly self-defeating pattern - for if you bring your hand back, bring your torso back, and simulateously open your thighs, there is nothing you can do but pull - especially if you are supposed to be steering at the same time! That particular combination of wrongness is a killer, and it was great to see those folks find their way through the pattern and begin to understand it for what it was.
Some of the professional riders I teach were doing really well, and impressing some well known conventional trainers. One, who is an international dressage judge, had recently taken to asking 'How did you just do that?' in response to a good riding correction. This is exactly the question I would want her to ask, and I hope my pupil has the courage to give her some really good answers!
I also taught several Grand Prix riders I had not taught before, one of whom is a well known name. Some were thrilled, and soaked up my knowledge like a sponge, whilst others found it much harder to take in. Perceiving and thinking differently probably does become harder the more practiced you are in your own way of doing it - especially if it has bought you considerable success!
I am now attempting to learn how to use my new compterised horse simulator, and I teach my first courses on it soon. It gives us the opportunity do to hands on work whilst the rider is in motion, and also to make good use of mirrors. But it's main claim to fame is the computerised feedback. One trace illustrates your weight - and we hope it does not look the same as it would if you jumped up and down on the bathroom scales! Another shows if you are to the right or left of the balance point, and ahead of or behind the balance point. It also measure rein tension, and if you are driving or retarding. These are the equivilent of pushing forward on the horse's rump and backwards on its chest. In a few short sessions, the feedback has really helped me to become more precise. It can be programmed to trot or canter in a variety of more or less powerful ways - although I have not yet become brave enough to play with this! It will be an interesting reasearch tool as well as an interesting teaching tool, and I am loking forward to the simulator weekends that we are going to hold throughout the year.
There is more information in Network News and on the Simulator page of the website, although I expect to update this regularly as I have more to tell. Watch that space!
