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Mar. 21st, 2017 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickDid the 8.58 mile loop last night in 1:42, a pace of almost exactly 5 mph. There is a lot of trotting (not exceptionally speedy trotting, but still) to make a 5 mph pace. We trotted almost everything that was trottable (I don’t like doing downhill grades on pavement at the trot) to make pace, including some fairly hefty uphill segments seeing as how da Bird is fit enough now to do some uphill trotting.
On Sunday, we did a short three mile outing, almost entirely at the walk, with Trys and Peake. That was mostly to get everyone back on track – Trys gets weird if she hasn’t been on the Peake for a couple of days. The horse is fine, the rider is twitchy, but whatever. So we did an outing just to get our feet wet again. During same, we reviewed lateral work and expanded Trys’s grasp of lateral stuff because, well, because she’s there and why not.
Trys is riding Peake, who is Nick’s eight? ten? year old baby. Peake is a kind mare, smart, wiggly, narrow arab. Forward, mostly. She’s not a problem and she likes to learn stuff. Trys is not the kind of person to just go exploring lateral work on her own without a roadmap or some one to kind of explain stuff. She’s not going to fuck around with laterals just to fuck around with laterals… whereas I will do that shit and keep doing that shit in the face of repeated failures and unending cluelessness. Nobody ever said I was clever. But anyway.
Lateral work for horses is as follows:
Turn on the HQ
Turn on the FH
Sidepass
Leg Yield
Shoulder Fore
Shoulder In
Haunches In (which, at the risk of starting Dressage Wars over here, is basically Haunches Out too, only to the other side. It’s not useful to discuss “haunches out” in contexts where you are going in a straight line. But like if you’re circling to the right, you can do Haunches Out (bent counter to the circle) and that would be a useful time to deploy the DQ wars munition Haunches Out. Regardless, I am going to use Haunches In and “in” is the direction the haunches are canted, so Haunches In Right means the horse’s butt is bent to the right, moving off of the LEFT leg/thigh aid.)
Half Pass (LOL nope not yet over hyar)
Turn on the HQ and turn on the FH are a matter of days to get working for you in a basic “at the halt” sort of way. Making ‘em pretty takes longer, always, but they’re fairly straightforward to teach for crude “green horse” levels of functional. Sidepass takes about a week for an ugly, wobbly affair. (Smooth, trail class ribbon winning sidepass takes longer but the concept takes about a week. Sidepass doesn’t have a lot of dressage utility in, like, tests and stuff but I find it useful as a way to teach horse and rider about combinations of aids: do not walk forward, move body sideways, catch up butt, catch up shoulders, not forward, and getting a horse thinking about lateral work.)
Leg yield, your basic kinda-flail-y green-horse leg yield, takes about two weeks for something that works at the walk. Trot another two weeks, canter two more weeks. It’ll get better if worked on more, but you’ve got a basic skill there in a month that (litmus test) a person on the ground can see happening.
Shoulder Fore I generally don’t mess with until I have a shoulder-in. I am not clueful enough to tell if I’m getting a shoulder-fore or not, so I do shoulder-in and then relax it to ‘not quite straight’ and people tell me this is shoulder-fore. My understanding of shoulder-fore is kind of shitty and I should get better at it.
Shoulder-In I know how to do and how to teach. I should probably do less with my inside rein when shoulder-inning and I’m working on that, but I know how to do it (okay, poorly) and how to teach it to horses that don’t know how to do it. I’m not good at canter shoulder-in but I can do walk and trot shoulder-in and have just right now made a note about cantering shoulder-ins come the mudfree season because fuckitall I‘ve never tried it and I should especially now that I have working leads and stuff. I bet you need a pretty fucking decent gathered up canter for canter-shoulder-in. Or if you have a clever bastard of a horse that knows shoulder-in from walk and trot, he might just gather up in canter FOR you when you assume the shoulder-in position. I will research this and report back.
Haunches-In I know how to do and how to teach. I can feel if horse goes in, I can fix shape if it is wrong, I can stop the popping-shoulder break, I can adjust how much haunches-in the horse is doing, and I can teach a horse how to do it if he doesn’t know how. I am not GREAT at it, but I’m certainly better than you would expect from someone who rides like this:
(there should be a picture here)
Hands open, rider tipped forward, ineffective attempt at ‘contact’, right shoulder dropped. Yeah, I can’t do fuck all on a horse.
But actually I can. Not as well as I’d like and not pretty but a damn sight more than you might expect. I also understand that there are prerequisites for haunches-in, things that have to be online before you can really discuss haunches-inning with your horse. I’ve been over this before, regarding how you get to shoulder-inning (because that’s pretty much the same deal, only with the front end of the horse and it’s easier for people because they can see it) and it’s (here) (link missing) if you want to go read it.
If you’re too lazy to click the link, for haunches-inning, you need to have the following things online.
1. You can bend horse and get horse to stay bent, the amount of bent that you want, while going forward. (Circles, serpentines, shoulder-in.)
2. You can adjust the amount of bent that your horse is, on the fly. Also you can feel how bent the horse is while you are sitting there without someone else to tell you from the ground. (You should have gotten this stuff on-line during leg yield and early shoulder-in efforts. Also, circles and serpentines.)
3. You can gather your horse up and rock a little of his weight back onto his hq so that he’s ready to do the thing. If you ride in ‘contact’ all the time like a dressage person, this is probably your ‘half halt’ thingie. If you slop around on a loose rein because you are a trail rider or a redneck yahoo (Sa-LUTE like from Hee Haw), this is where you sit a little deeper and gather up your reins into what passes for contact in your sad and lonely life Because Shit Is Gonna Get Real Yo. (Your horse likely learned about this for shoulder-in and for leg yield and for turns on the HQ.)
4. Horse is OK with continual, ongoing instructions in a contact-y way for stuff. (This is something he learned about in leg yield and more in shoulder-in, in doing teardrops and other figures. He should be good on this now.)
5. You can ask your horse to move his butt away from your leg and he does it and you can feel it when he does it. This sounds super easy, but baby, it’s the part that people can’t fucking get for haunches-in. Let’s deconstruct a little, shall we? Part the first: You can ask your horse to move his butt away from your leg. Part the second: He Does It. And part the third is You Can Feel It When He Does It. You really do have to have this locked down or there is not going to be any satisfactory haunches-inning in your world.
If you have all five things of the prerequisites working for you, haunches-in is a matter of practice, of chipping away at it, for a step here and there, gather up, slight bend (a little more inside eyeball), ask hq to step over, get the step, release, good horse, walk on. Repeat about a hundred times for each side. Gather up, slight bend, ask for step, get step, release, good horse. And it’s Not Gonna Go Like That to start, especially if you are missing some things or some things aren’t good. If you’re doing this in independent study, you will THINK your things are good, but they are likely less-good than you think. When things do not go as expected, REVISIT your fundamentals and buff ‘em up. Improve your understanding of each.
Gather up – maybe horse gets inverted, tight, doesn’t understand contact or half halt, so you have to FIX THAT and get a good gather up or you can’t proceed. Your gather up has to work (and work, like, NOW. You should not be spending ten minutes to gather up your horse.) so that horse is physically in the position he needs to be in to DO THE THING. You have to be able to tell that he’s in a good gather up or that he’s NOT in a good gather up.
Slight bend – ask for slight bend to where you can see the corner eyeball on the side you’re going to put the haunches on. So, if you’re doing Haunches In Right, you want to see a bit of Right Eyeball. Maybe you get way too much bend or your horse braces against the bit or the head twists instead of bending or you have a locked joint up at the axis or whatever. FIX THIS. Get it right. Get your slight bend and hold it. You have to be able to tell what is the right bend and to fix it if it’s not right.
Ask for step over – so you put your left leg (we’re doing Haunches In Right) back a little and on, like you would ask for a Turn On The Forehand, kinda, and you’re wanting the haunches to slide to the right like, well, like a fishtailing car. (Ideally, you ask for this when correct hind leg is in the air. I’m not sure what hind leg that is. Go read some actual advice instead of getting your dressage information from a redneck on a parrot-mouthed Arab.) When you get better at this, hopefully you will notice that you can get it by just dropping the hip socket thing instead of putting your foot back at the break of his ribcage. But in the beginning, it’s OK to use your leg back a bit.
Now, the first time or ten that you ask for this you are going to get a variety of stupid responses from your horse. This is because he doesn’t know what you want. I mean, you COULD get the step over, in which case you release and let him walk straight and lots of GOOD BOY and so forth. I am assuming you know what to do when it goes right. But if it does not go right (and it probably won’t) then you need to fix it.
Possible incorrect responses to “Please Haunches-in, Right”:
Case 1. He Speeds Up. If he speeds up, you slow him down. Regroup. Gather, bend, ask again. Note that when he stops speeding up and starts trying other crap, he is not “being bad” he is looking for the answer. He now knows that “speed up” is not the answer and he’s trying other stuff. This is progress, not failure.
Case 2. He “leg yields” or drifts diagonally to the Right instead of doing Haunches-In to the Right. Apply some right thigh/knee to block that in the moment if you can, but if you’re out of space to work, regroup, gather, bend, ask again But With Pre-emptive Blocking. See how that goes. Again, horse is trying things to figure out what you want. He’s not being bad on purpose.
Case 3. He breaks at the (for our example) LEFT shoulder and swings the HQ way way over to the right without bending through the ribcage (this is the typical evasion for haunches-in on overachieving, bendier horses). If this happens, keep doing what you are doing but soften the left leg aid a little (ask for less “butt-over”) while activating the left rein to get the shoulder back under control. Depending on horse, some right leg at the girth might give them something to bend ribs around. Play with it – this is a response that can be shaped into the CORRECT response, so it’s not a Regroup-start-all-over thing. Get a right step, release, reward.
Case 4. He does fuck-all and stays straight without some kind of change. This is likeliest for kick rides. If this happens, add some activity to your asking leg (here, the left one)… bump-bump-bump. Don’t thwack him with it like an angry ten year old ponyclubber, but bump-bump-bump. Annoy (maintaining your gather up and your bend) until you get a response. He will probably do one of the responses above and then you can flowchart your way to success. (Or not.)
Case 5. He steps over a small amount, so that the back left foot track falls in between the left and right front foot tracks. You can’t feel this because it’s not real obvious and it’s not real certain and you’re not real sure what you’re trying to feel. So, you keep asking once he’s there but he’s stiff and weak and this is the best he can do for right now and he really is trying for you, really, but there is no release for him to tell him it was right. Everyone gets discouraged.
Case 5 Rider: “He’s Not Doing The Thing! I keep asking and nothing happens!!! He’s totally ignoring me. ARGH!!!”
Case 5 Horse: “Rider is still asking, there is no release, and I am trying very hard. Shit, this must not be the right thing!! ARGH!!!”
Don’t be the Case 5 pair, okay. Just don’t. DO NOT be that pair. That is when your learning horse is doing EXACTLY THE RIGHT THING TO THE BEST OF HIS ABILITY AND YOU DO NOT NOTICE AND KEEP ASKING INSTEAD OF REWARDING. Case 5 is the wrongest you can be as a rider trying to teach a horse.
If you can’t feel shit, get a fucking spotter on the ground and work while walking directly away from them, with them standing behind you and looking at the “outside” hind foot footfall relative to the front foot tracks. (In our example, Haunches-in Right, spotter looks at the LEFT HIND FOOT.) Remember, your horse’s early efforts at haunches-in will not be real obvious or real skilled. They’re going to be minimal and wobbly and YOUR JOB is to note those small tries and REWARD THEM. Do not be the Case 5 rider, here. Even if you THINK you maybe felt something, release and reward. Err on the side of being too lenient, especially in the beginning.
If you live where there are no helpers at all, like, alone in the middle of the wilderness, then you can try the Not Recommended “Peek Over Your Shoulder” solution. This is not ideal. This is not classical dressage. This is NOT how it is supposed to work. This is like fixing the hole in the ass of your pants with duct tape and JUST as classy. But if you can’t feel stuff and can’t get a helper and for some reason you still need to do this, Gather up, bend for inside eyeball, THEN PEEK OVER YOUR INSIDE SHOULDER SO THAT YOU CAN SEE HAUNCH out of the corner of your eye. THEN ask for hq to step over. You’ll be able to see it swing. This is NOT IDEAL because it twists you in the saddle more than you need and fucks up which seatbone you weight and it means you’re not going to be able to see or feel the shoulder kick out (see case 3 up above) but it is better than Case 5. It will probably generate for you Case 3 responses which will at least let you learn what the car fishtail motion feels like and then you can learn to feel it and once you can feel it then you can address the shoulder as per Case 3. But really it’s easier and better if you get a spotter.
Okay, so you’ve practiced that a lot and a lot and a lot. Now you can gather up, get the eyeball, and ask for the step over and your horse does that like easy peasy. It’s become a gestalt of “haunches-in” instead of different steps. You barely have to ask anymore because he feels you start to get to the shape and makes the shape. You can feel it, you can bend him over a little or a lot, and you don’t need anybody on the ground to tell you when it’s happening. The single-step-over haunches-in works great and it works great to either side.
NOW you’re ready to start trying to carry it forward, for a few steps at a time. (And he should have the strength and flexibility for this, a little, now because of all his ‘get a single step’ practice. All those little ask practices were like exercises for him, not only to learn how to get into haunches-in but to help him build the muscles for haunches-inning so that he’ll be ready for this part.) So do that. Try for three steps. If horse falls out, put him back in. You should have no trouble putting him back in now because you’re like an expert at that since you have now done it hundreds of time. He’s not got the strength to do more than a few steps at a time, so don’t be greedy with this. Do a few steps, praise. Repeat like four or five times in amongst other activities (not just all at once hammering it) and then let it go for the day. (You are Elsa. Let It Go, Let It Go!)
Gradually, over time, increase the amount of walking haunches-in that you have. Play with three tracks or four. Use a spotter if needed to improve your feel and your control of the bend. Particularly for four tracks, watch the shoulder and make sure it doesn’t break. When you can do ten steps of walking haunches-in that are consistent and decent-ish, start working it in trot. Start with ask-in-trot, then couple-of-steps,etc. Just like you did at the walk. This stuff takes a lot of time. Be patient and reward good efforts. Play with “haunches-in at walk, maintain shape, pick up trot, maintain shape, etc.
This stuff is hard, like difficult-exercise-hard, for your horse. Think of haunches-in as… well… chinups.
If you can’t do a chinup, you start with dead-weight hangs. You work on that until you can hang (straight arms) for like 60 seconds. Then you practice hanging with your arms bent, like you are at the “up” part of the chinup. And you do that until you can do it for 60 seconds. Then you do what are called “negatives” – with a box under you, get yourself in the “up” part of the chinup and then bend your knees (so that you’re hanging) and lower yourself slowly until your arms are straight. Stand on box, put yourself back in “up” position, repeat. Doing negatives takes MORE strength than just hanging but LESS strength than a chinup. Do negatives until they are easy. Then you can start working on actual chinups. Now think about how long it would take you to be a good chin-upper if you worked on your chinups a little every other day. Make sure you give your horse enough regular practice and enough time to get there, okay?
Your horse cannot just step up to the bar and bang out twenty perfect fucking chinups in good form any more than you, middle-aged dressage lady, can do that. He’s gotta work up to it. Give him the time and the gently progressive exercise that he needs to get there and for pete’s sake don’t squish his baby haunches-in efforts by demanding what he can’t physically do yet.
(Oh good lord I do go on.)
But anyway, my point here was that on Sunday during our very boring minimal 3 mile walkies ride, I was the spotter behind Trys and telling her “Now” when her horse was doing it for beginner haunches-in. And she was all “I can’t feel it.” so I had her swing a leg over on da Bird (who is almost reliable at carrying it forward in trot) to see if she could feel it on a more-experienced horse who knew how to do the thing and who had the strength and flexi to do a bigger amount of the thing and is also 4″ taller than Peake so he’s just overall bigger and she was like “Oh. Okay!” because he does it easier and bigger and more obviously and with greater certainty than Peake. (Go Bird!) Peake does do it for me and for Trys, just wobbly and beginner and not so certain or so big. So, hopefully Trys can start on some independent study regarding haunches-in with Peake now that she kinda knows what she’s trying to feel for.
On Sunday, we did a short three mile outing, almost entirely at the walk, with Trys and Peake. That was mostly to get everyone back on track – Trys gets weird if she hasn’t been on the Peake for a couple of days. The horse is fine, the rider is twitchy, but whatever. So we did an outing just to get our feet wet again. During same, we reviewed lateral work and expanded Trys’s grasp of lateral stuff because, well, because she’s there and why not.
Trys is riding Peake, who is Nick’s eight? ten? year old baby. Peake is a kind mare, smart, wiggly, narrow arab. Forward, mostly. She’s not a problem and she likes to learn stuff. Trys is not the kind of person to just go exploring lateral work on her own without a roadmap or some one to kind of explain stuff. She’s not going to fuck around with laterals just to fuck around with laterals… whereas I will do that shit and keep doing that shit in the face of repeated failures and unending cluelessness. Nobody ever said I was clever. But anyway.
Lateral work for horses is as follows:
Turn on the HQ
Turn on the FH
Sidepass
Leg Yield
Shoulder Fore
Shoulder In
Haunches In (which, at the risk of starting Dressage Wars over here, is basically Haunches Out too, only to the other side. It’s not useful to discuss “haunches out” in contexts where you are going in a straight line. But like if you’re circling to the right, you can do Haunches Out (bent counter to the circle) and that would be a useful time to deploy the DQ wars munition Haunches Out. Regardless, I am going to use Haunches In and “in” is the direction the haunches are canted, so Haunches In Right means the horse’s butt is bent to the right, moving off of the LEFT leg/thigh aid.)
Half Pass (LOL nope not yet over hyar)
Turn on the HQ and turn on the FH are a matter of days to get working for you in a basic “at the halt” sort of way. Making ‘em pretty takes longer, always, but they’re fairly straightforward to teach for crude “green horse” levels of functional. Sidepass takes about a week for an ugly, wobbly affair. (Smooth, trail class ribbon winning sidepass takes longer but the concept takes about a week. Sidepass doesn’t have a lot of dressage utility in, like, tests and stuff but I find it useful as a way to teach horse and rider about combinations of aids: do not walk forward, move body sideways, catch up butt, catch up shoulders, not forward, and getting a horse thinking about lateral work.)
Leg yield, your basic kinda-flail-y green-horse leg yield, takes about two weeks for something that works at the walk. Trot another two weeks, canter two more weeks. It’ll get better if worked on more, but you’ve got a basic skill there in a month that (litmus test) a person on the ground can see happening.
Shoulder Fore I generally don’t mess with until I have a shoulder-in. I am not clueful enough to tell if I’m getting a shoulder-fore or not, so I do shoulder-in and then relax it to ‘not quite straight’ and people tell me this is shoulder-fore. My understanding of shoulder-fore is kind of shitty and I should get better at it.
Shoulder-In I know how to do and how to teach. I should probably do less with my inside rein when shoulder-inning and I’m working on that, but I know how to do it (okay, poorly) and how to teach it to horses that don’t know how to do it. I’m not good at canter shoulder-in but I can do walk and trot shoulder-in and have just right now made a note about cantering shoulder-ins come the mudfree season because fuckitall I‘ve never tried it and I should especially now that I have working leads and stuff. I bet you need a pretty fucking decent gathered up canter for canter-shoulder-in. Or if you have a clever bastard of a horse that knows shoulder-in from walk and trot, he might just gather up in canter FOR you when you assume the shoulder-in position. I will research this and report back.
Haunches-In I know how to do and how to teach. I can feel if horse goes in, I can fix shape if it is wrong, I can stop the popping-shoulder break, I can adjust how much haunches-in the horse is doing, and I can teach a horse how to do it if he doesn’t know how. I am not GREAT at it, but I’m certainly better than you would expect from someone who rides like this:
(there should be a picture here)
Hands open, rider tipped forward, ineffective attempt at ‘contact’, right shoulder dropped. Yeah, I can’t do fuck all on a horse.
But actually I can. Not as well as I’d like and not pretty but a damn sight more than you might expect. I also understand that there are prerequisites for haunches-in, things that have to be online before you can really discuss haunches-inning with your horse. I’ve been over this before, regarding how you get to shoulder-inning (because that’s pretty much the same deal, only with the front end of the horse and it’s easier for people because they can see it) and it’s (here) (link missing) if you want to go read it.
If you’re too lazy to click the link, for haunches-inning, you need to have the following things online.
1. You can bend horse and get horse to stay bent, the amount of bent that you want, while going forward. (Circles, serpentines, shoulder-in.)
2. You can adjust the amount of bent that your horse is, on the fly. Also you can feel how bent the horse is while you are sitting there without someone else to tell you from the ground. (You should have gotten this stuff on-line during leg yield and early shoulder-in efforts. Also, circles and serpentines.)
3. You can gather your horse up and rock a little of his weight back onto his hq so that he’s ready to do the thing. If you ride in ‘contact’ all the time like a dressage person, this is probably your ‘half halt’ thingie. If you slop around on a loose rein because you are a trail rider or a redneck yahoo (Sa-LUTE like from Hee Haw), this is where you sit a little deeper and gather up your reins into what passes for contact in your sad and lonely life Because Shit Is Gonna Get Real Yo. (Your horse likely learned about this for shoulder-in and for leg yield and for turns on the HQ.)
4. Horse is OK with continual, ongoing instructions in a contact-y way for stuff. (This is something he learned about in leg yield and more in shoulder-in, in doing teardrops and other figures. He should be good on this now.)
5. You can ask your horse to move his butt away from your leg and he does it and you can feel it when he does it. This sounds super easy, but baby, it’s the part that people can’t fucking get for haunches-in. Let’s deconstruct a little, shall we? Part the first: You can ask your horse to move his butt away from your leg. Part the second: He Does It. And part the third is You Can Feel It When He Does It. You really do have to have this locked down or there is not going to be any satisfactory haunches-inning in your world.
If you have all five things of the prerequisites working for you, haunches-in is a matter of practice, of chipping away at it, for a step here and there, gather up, slight bend (a little more inside eyeball), ask hq to step over, get the step, release, good horse, walk on. Repeat about a hundred times for each side. Gather up, slight bend, ask for step, get step, release, good horse. And it’s Not Gonna Go Like That to start, especially if you are missing some things or some things aren’t good. If you’re doing this in independent study, you will THINK your things are good, but they are likely less-good than you think. When things do not go as expected, REVISIT your fundamentals and buff ‘em up. Improve your understanding of each.
Gather up – maybe horse gets inverted, tight, doesn’t understand contact or half halt, so you have to FIX THAT and get a good gather up or you can’t proceed. Your gather up has to work (and work, like, NOW. You should not be spending ten minutes to gather up your horse.) so that horse is physically in the position he needs to be in to DO THE THING. You have to be able to tell that he’s in a good gather up or that he’s NOT in a good gather up.
Slight bend – ask for slight bend to where you can see the corner eyeball on the side you’re going to put the haunches on. So, if you’re doing Haunches In Right, you want to see a bit of Right Eyeball. Maybe you get way too much bend or your horse braces against the bit or the head twists instead of bending or you have a locked joint up at the axis or whatever. FIX THIS. Get it right. Get your slight bend and hold it. You have to be able to tell what is the right bend and to fix it if it’s not right.
Ask for step over – so you put your left leg (we’re doing Haunches In Right) back a little and on, like you would ask for a Turn On The Forehand, kinda, and you’re wanting the haunches to slide to the right like, well, like a fishtailing car. (Ideally, you ask for this when correct hind leg is in the air. I’m not sure what hind leg that is. Go read some actual advice instead of getting your dressage information from a redneck on a parrot-mouthed Arab.) When you get better at this, hopefully you will notice that you can get it by just dropping the hip socket thing instead of putting your foot back at the break of his ribcage. But in the beginning, it’s OK to use your leg back a bit.
Now, the first time or ten that you ask for this you are going to get a variety of stupid responses from your horse. This is because he doesn’t know what you want. I mean, you COULD get the step over, in which case you release and let him walk straight and lots of GOOD BOY and so forth. I am assuming you know what to do when it goes right. But if it does not go right (and it probably won’t) then you need to fix it.
Possible incorrect responses to “Please Haunches-in, Right”:
Case 1. He Speeds Up. If he speeds up, you slow him down. Regroup. Gather, bend, ask again. Note that when he stops speeding up and starts trying other crap, he is not “being bad” he is looking for the answer. He now knows that “speed up” is not the answer and he’s trying other stuff. This is progress, not failure.
Case 2. He “leg yields” or drifts diagonally to the Right instead of doing Haunches-In to the Right. Apply some right thigh/knee to block that in the moment if you can, but if you’re out of space to work, regroup, gather, bend, ask again But With Pre-emptive Blocking. See how that goes. Again, horse is trying things to figure out what you want. He’s not being bad on purpose.
Case 3. He breaks at the (for our example) LEFT shoulder and swings the HQ way way over to the right without bending through the ribcage (this is the typical evasion for haunches-in on overachieving, bendier horses). If this happens, keep doing what you are doing but soften the left leg aid a little (ask for less “butt-over”) while activating the left rein to get the shoulder back under control. Depending on horse, some right leg at the girth might give them something to bend ribs around. Play with it – this is a response that can be shaped into the CORRECT response, so it’s not a Regroup-start-all-over thing. Get a right step, release, reward.
Case 4. He does fuck-all and stays straight without some kind of change. This is likeliest for kick rides. If this happens, add some activity to your asking leg (here, the left one)… bump-bump-bump. Don’t thwack him with it like an angry ten year old ponyclubber, but bump-bump-bump. Annoy (maintaining your gather up and your bend) until you get a response. He will probably do one of the responses above and then you can flowchart your way to success. (Or not.)
Case 5. He steps over a small amount, so that the back left foot track falls in between the left and right front foot tracks. You can’t feel this because it’s not real obvious and it’s not real certain and you’re not real sure what you’re trying to feel. So, you keep asking once he’s there but he’s stiff and weak and this is the best he can do for right now and he really is trying for you, really, but there is no release for him to tell him it was right. Everyone gets discouraged.
Case 5 Rider: “He’s Not Doing The Thing! I keep asking and nothing happens!!! He’s totally ignoring me. ARGH!!!”
Case 5 Horse: “Rider is still asking, there is no release, and I am trying very hard. Shit, this must not be the right thing!! ARGH!!!”
Don’t be the Case 5 pair, okay. Just don’t. DO NOT be that pair. That is when your learning horse is doing EXACTLY THE RIGHT THING TO THE BEST OF HIS ABILITY AND YOU DO NOT NOTICE AND KEEP ASKING INSTEAD OF REWARDING. Case 5 is the wrongest you can be as a rider trying to teach a horse.
If you can’t feel shit, get a fucking spotter on the ground and work while walking directly away from them, with them standing behind you and looking at the “outside” hind foot footfall relative to the front foot tracks. (In our example, Haunches-in Right, spotter looks at the LEFT HIND FOOT.) Remember, your horse’s early efforts at haunches-in will not be real obvious or real skilled. They’re going to be minimal and wobbly and YOUR JOB is to note those small tries and REWARD THEM. Do not be the Case 5 rider, here. Even if you THINK you maybe felt something, release and reward. Err on the side of being too lenient, especially in the beginning.
If you live where there are no helpers at all, like, alone in the middle of the wilderness, then you can try the Not Recommended “Peek Over Your Shoulder” solution. This is not ideal. This is not classical dressage. This is NOT how it is supposed to work. This is like fixing the hole in the ass of your pants with duct tape and JUST as classy. But if you can’t feel stuff and can’t get a helper and for some reason you still need to do this, Gather up, bend for inside eyeball, THEN PEEK OVER YOUR INSIDE SHOULDER SO THAT YOU CAN SEE HAUNCH out of the corner of your eye. THEN ask for hq to step over. You’ll be able to see it swing. This is NOT IDEAL because it twists you in the saddle more than you need and fucks up which seatbone you weight and it means you’re not going to be able to see or feel the shoulder kick out (see case 3 up above) but it is better than Case 5. It will probably generate for you Case 3 responses which will at least let you learn what the car fishtail motion feels like and then you can learn to feel it and once you can feel it then you can address the shoulder as per Case 3. But really it’s easier and better if you get a spotter.
Okay, so you’ve practiced that a lot and a lot and a lot. Now you can gather up, get the eyeball, and ask for the step over and your horse does that like easy peasy. It’s become a gestalt of “haunches-in” instead of different steps. You barely have to ask anymore because he feels you start to get to the shape and makes the shape. You can feel it, you can bend him over a little or a lot, and you don’t need anybody on the ground to tell you when it’s happening. The single-step-over haunches-in works great and it works great to either side.
NOW you’re ready to start trying to carry it forward, for a few steps at a time. (And he should have the strength and flexibility for this, a little, now because of all his ‘get a single step’ practice. All those little ask practices were like exercises for him, not only to learn how to get into haunches-in but to help him build the muscles for haunches-inning so that he’ll be ready for this part.) So do that. Try for three steps. If horse falls out, put him back in. You should have no trouble putting him back in now because you’re like an expert at that since you have now done it hundreds of time. He’s not got the strength to do more than a few steps at a time, so don’t be greedy with this. Do a few steps, praise. Repeat like four or five times in amongst other activities (not just all at once hammering it) and then let it go for the day. (You are Elsa. Let It Go, Let It Go!)
Gradually, over time, increase the amount of walking haunches-in that you have. Play with three tracks or four. Use a spotter if needed to improve your feel and your control of the bend. Particularly for four tracks, watch the shoulder and make sure it doesn’t break. When you can do ten steps of walking haunches-in that are consistent and decent-ish, start working it in trot. Start with ask-in-trot, then couple-of-steps,etc. Just like you did at the walk. This stuff takes a lot of time. Be patient and reward good efforts. Play with “haunches-in at walk, maintain shape, pick up trot, maintain shape, etc.
This stuff is hard, like difficult-exercise-hard, for your horse. Think of haunches-in as… well… chinups.
If you can’t do a chinup, you start with dead-weight hangs. You work on that until you can hang (straight arms) for like 60 seconds. Then you practice hanging with your arms bent, like you are at the “up” part of the chinup. And you do that until you can do it for 60 seconds. Then you do what are called “negatives” – with a box under you, get yourself in the “up” part of the chinup and then bend your knees (so that you’re hanging) and lower yourself slowly until your arms are straight. Stand on box, put yourself back in “up” position, repeat. Doing negatives takes MORE strength than just hanging but LESS strength than a chinup. Do negatives until they are easy. Then you can start working on actual chinups. Now think about how long it would take you to be a good chin-upper if you worked on your chinups a little every other day. Make sure you give your horse enough regular practice and enough time to get there, okay?
Your horse cannot just step up to the bar and bang out twenty perfect fucking chinups in good form any more than you, middle-aged dressage lady, can do that. He’s gotta work up to it. Give him the time and the gently progressive exercise that he needs to get there and for pete’s sake don’t squish his baby haunches-in efforts by demanding what he can’t physically do yet.
(Oh good lord I do go on.)
But anyway, my point here was that on Sunday during our very boring minimal 3 mile walkies ride, I was the spotter behind Trys and telling her “Now” when her horse was doing it for beginner haunches-in. And she was all “I can’t feel it.” so I had her swing a leg over on da Bird (who is almost reliable at carrying it forward in trot) to see if she could feel it on a more-experienced horse who knew how to do the thing and who had the strength and flexi to do a bigger amount of the thing and is also 4″ taller than Peake so he’s just overall bigger and she was like “Oh. Okay!” because he does it easier and bigger and more obviously and with greater certainty than Peake. (Go Bird!) Peake does do it for me and for Trys, just wobbly and beginner and not so certain or so big. So, hopefully Trys can start on some independent study regarding haunches-in with Peake now that she kinda knows what she’s trying to feel for.
