Chapter Member, Jill Owens, has been kindly sharing her thoughts and impressions of her experiences while attending the Osierlea Extravaganza. This is her third article in her series named Finding the Holy Grail. Thank you, Jill, for your perceptive and insightful article!
Holy Grail
I recently attended the Osierlea Spring Extravaganza, held March 18-20. The title for the symposium was “Is It Me Or The Horse?” This theme honors the balance between good riding and good horse training, and both concepts were given equal attention throughout the weekend.
I really appreciate this balance, because as a student of dressage I have experienced some conflict and confusion between the two ideas. The rider-biomechanics instructor teaches that good riding makes everything fall into place, and tells me that a solid core is the key to getting an even tempo, accurate steering, leads, lateral movements, etc. The horse trainer emphasizes teaching the horse about these things, and warns me not to get overly focused on my biomechanics and forget about training my horse.
What to do? Well, both of course. But how to put them together? That was what this Extravaganza was all about.
First and foremost, we must ride with a stable core. After last Fall’s Extravaganza I wrote about how I had, at long last, learned to access my core muscles. (See http://cdseastbay.org/2010/12/finding-the-holy-grail-at-osierlea-by-jill-owens/ ). I’ve been practicing keeping these muscles engaged, and I was pleased to learn at this Extravaganza that I had pretty well nailed that one down. The other group of muscles that must be kept engaged are the scapular stabilizers, which keep your shoulders and chest stable. I needed some work on those, as I had been putting all my focus on my core. That came fairly easily, and I am happy to think that I am nearing the state of “unconscious competence” as regards my torso stability.
Many of the errors of bad riding—bad hands, wobbly legs, unsteady balance—correct themselves when we get the torso stabilized, and, naturally, we can greatly enhance the horse’s movement by doing this. And perhaps a gifted rider can get on just about any horse and elicit correct movement through extraordinary riding. However, most of us mere mortals must also teach our horses what to do. This is where horse training comes in, and in fact, whether we realize it or not, the horse is always learning, an idea that was emphasized repeatedly at the symposium.
I like connecting new ideas with old knowledge, and I found myself often referring in my mind to one of my favorite books, Michael Shaffer’s Riding in the Moment, which “explains dressage in a new and clear way. It begins with the five first tier basics; Go, Stop, Turn in, Move out, and Soften. These ‘First Tier Basics’ are at the core of everything in dressage—they are used to create all of the figures, movements, and qualities we want in our horses.”1 The five basics are taught to the horse cognitively; that is, he is trained to do them in response to a cue, not made to do them mechanically with “more inside leg,” “more outside rein,” etc.
Much of our weekend was devoted to understanding how horses learn and how best to teach them to respond to feather-light cues, rather than how to mechanically make them do things. A lot of time was spent doing exercises that challenged us to get transitions and other movements on core alone—no hands or legs. It was exciting and enlightening to find that we could indeed ask that way, and the horses could learn to respond correctly!
So the question of whether to solve training issues through better riding or to solve riding issues through better training was answered. Both are true: start with good riding and then teach your horse! But, alas, like many simple truths, the execution is far from simple, and I know for me it will be a life-long pursuit.
Another issue was finally cleared up for me in this Extravaganza: the question of “frontal plane rotation” (rider turns the entire torso to one side) versus the “spiral seat” (rider’s hips follow the horse’s hips; rider’s shoulders follow the horse’s shoulders). I have asked about this many times and never had a satisfactory answer. This time I finally got one that made sense! Here is the Osierlea explanation, in my own words:
There are two reasons we strive for a stable seat atop our mounts. The first is to enable him to easily bear the burden of the rider by not disrupting his balance. We want to be like a very firmly strapped on backpack, not a wobbly, constantly shifting burden that requires the horse to always be stepping here and there to keep from falling down. Second, we want any movement we intentionally make to be highly noticeable to the horse. We don’t want to offer him a bunch of extraneous movements because he then merely tunes them out and will never learn to be sensitive to our very subtle cues.
Thus, in our bodies we want as much stability as possible—lateral stability (side to side), longitudinal stability (front to back), and rotational stability (top and bottom on the same plane). Guess what happens when we do the spiral seat? We lose rotational stability! Since the horse doesn’t know what our shoulders are doing—he only feels our seat (after all, we are sitting on him, not lying down on him)—there is nothing to be gained, and plenty to lose, by spiraling the torso.
How does aiming the frontal plane to the outside result in the horse bending to the inside? Here’s one theory: When we put the outside seat bone back, we change his balance ever so slightly so that he is inclined to step under with his inside hind to maintain his balance. To step under with ease, the horse must bend his body. But if we take our shoulders in a different direction from our hips, we sacrifice our own rotational stability. At best, the spiral seat lessens our influence, and at worst it can cause unwanted imbalance and confusion in the horse.
For more information about Jill and her horses, see www.jillandgypsy.com .
1Michael Schaffer, at http://www.mikeschaffer.com/ .
