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which_chickSo I signed up for DLB clinic at the end of June. In contrast to previous years, I have signed up for TWO DAYS IN A ROW of DLB. Let us all hope that I have the fortitude to make it through both days without bawling in the ring like a frustrated toddler. Probably I should make sure to eat before my ride time, just in case.
Low blood sugar + stress + kind clinician words = toddler meltdown, in my world. Probably it's the frustration of wanting to be better slamming into the hard reality of how much I suck. Toddler meltdowns are basically Dunning-Kruger hitting me in the face, over and over. You'd think I'd eventually figure out that this is the way of things, but no. Every single time, every single DLB clinic I am Charlie Brown, the eternal optimist. I go running for the football, gonna kick it for sure this time, you betcha. And every time I wind up on my back in the grass, wondering what the fuck happened.
At least the sky's pretty today, innit?
I made an explanatory graphic for dressage land so that I could look at it regularly to remind myself that I was still progressing...
... but it doesn't make me feel any better. It should make me feel better, but it does not.
At any rate, in pursuit of DLB clinic fitness, I have been working hard to get more days on Bird, with an eye to overall fitness. He needs days off to recover from the work but he also needs a regular and progressive schedule of work to get FIT ENOUGH to do the work. Like, we can't do much clinic work on lift in canter if the boy is whipped after like three canter efforts. He needs to be fit enough to do many canter efforts, in Fancy Canter, so that DLB can see us do it and offer helpful advice.
Fancy Canter is our current work project for DLB. Like, that's the thing that we are supposed to be working on at the moment. Last time we saw DLB, the homework was Fancy Canter.
Bird's fitness needs to be both aerobic and muscular. So we're working on that. Aerobic fitness through hill marches and trot sets. Muscular fitness from lateral work, fancy trot and fancy canter to work the abs. Bird is reasonably fit for regular everyday riding. He can lope along happily and not be dead. He doesn't ever get that thick white foam between his back legs (like you do when you ride an unfit horse in work on a hot day). When he sweats, it's thin and clear... and he can do a fair amount of work before he starts to sweat, especially if it's not hot/humid out. His strength is improving for Fancy Canter and he can do more efforts (and each effort is longer) before deflating. Will it be enough? I don't know. I never know.
Right now (a month out) we're doing about three different sorts of workout. All workouts start with about fifteen minutes of walk and relaxed trot to get things online. Horse isn't asked for actual work of any sort until he's lightly warm to the touch and "smells like a horse".
(We're using the dirt track around the copse of trees right now for our field work because the hay is too tall to be ridden on at the moment. Once the hay is cut, we will be back to doing more strictly-field work in the field.)
Type 1: Canter work. Fancy Canter, alternating lead and direction around the copse, for as long as fancy canter holds out. When horse deflates out of Fancy Canter (it feels like his hind legs start trailing behind) then we walk the rest of the circuit, turn around, and try the other lead until it fails similarly. Walk rest of circuit, trot a full lap in a nice midrange trot (he actually recovers during this part), and then repeat from start of cantering effort. Do until horse has no Fancy Canter left. Right now, this is about six efforts. Each effort lasts about 2/3 of the long side of the copse. By the time we're done both he and I are sweating. Fancy Canter is a lot of work for both of us. (He can't do it if I'm faffing about up there. I have to have a good, consistent, quiet position so that I don't get in his way or there is no Fancy Canter at all. It takes abs from me, too.) There's no point to doing more canter than he can do in Fancy Canter. BAD canter efforts do not use the muscles we are trying to build, so we do not do bad canter efforts. Currently he gets two days of canter work per week.
Type 2: Lateral work. We are currently working on leg yield, shoulder in, and haunches in at walk and trot. He can leg yield in canter but not shoulder in or haunches in in canter yet. Not enough abs. So, we do lateral work at walk and trot, mostly trot now that he understands the concepts, in a variety of exercises... from "trot in straight line doing the thing" to "Please to be doing three trots of haunches-in-left then three straight trots then three trots of haunches-in-right" or "Shoulder-in bent to the left for four then haunches-in bent to the left for four then back to shoulder-in to the left for four". We warm up on the straight line stuff of just "do the thing" at what I think of as his basic speed before asking for change-up stuff or "do the thing" in a bigger, brighter trot. Change-up stuff is hard and requires balance and precision from him... like, I want the shifts to be snappy and clear. He really has to maintain a nicely balanced trot to do them. Oddly, haunches-in left and right swaps are way easier for him than shoulder-in left and right swaps. I think it's because he needs to shift more weight rearward to be able to flip the shoulder-in shape left and right. He struggles with that but is improving... and I might be wrong about why it's hard for him. Again, like with Fancy Canter, after a while I can feel him deflating to where he's not got it anymore. When he's struggling to do a decent effort, we quit. I work laterals pretty hard one day of the week.
Type 3: Road work. Road work is walk and trot on the shoulder of the hard road. There are cars. He's pretty solid at traffic, though, and we don't use a super busy road anyway. It has some nice solid hills which we BRISKLY MARCH UP. (Briskly marching up hills works the cardio harder while also being easier on the joints than trotting.) We trot some of the nicer flat sections. There is only enough lateral work on road work days to keep him on the shoulder of the road, so the occasional leg yield over. The basic road work effort is to the covered bridge stop sign and back, about four miles. If desired, I can add another 1.6 miles including another fairly beefy hill. Road work days are something of a break from the endless ab grind that is fucking dressage and I'm trying to get two days of road work in per week.
Some clinician once asked me what "dressage" meant to me. I had, at that juncture, an insufficient grasp of the concept and put forth some useless bullshit answer. I probably STILL have an insufficient grasp of the concept, but now my insufficient grasp is such that "dressage" means Your Horse Needs More Abs.
Bird gets two days off a week to not-work. He does better with days off. Endless no-days-off and ride-every-day makes him flat and unenthusiastic. On days off, we go across the road and hand graze in the tall grass for an hour or so while I read a book on my phone. (It's nicer grass than is in his field, which is kind of gnawed down. He has good hay in his field because the grass is not great, but he prefers grass. Hand grazing in the tall grass is a treat for him.)
So those are the things that we're doing to add fitness to Bird so that he can survive two days of DLB clinic wherein I make an effort to get further direction on our Fancy Canter.
I can hear you now... Where is the montage? I was promised a training montage!
It was a with-words montage. You just read it. There are no pictures. Sorry. There is also no inspirational music.
I do think it's working, though. Saddle fitter came and went (Finally!!) and da Birb is now in the Wide/XW (orange) gullet bar for his Thorowgood. (He started in a blue. Then he was a red. Now he's an orange.) Up a tree size in the course of a year... he's building something.
Low blood sugar + stress + kind clinician words = toddler meltdown, in my world. Probably it's the frustration of wanting to be better slamming into the hard reality of how much I suck. Toddler meltdowns are basically Dunning-Kruger hitting me in the face, over and over. You'd think I'd eventually figure out that this is the way of things, but no. Every single time, every single DLB clinic I am Charlie Brown, the eternal optimist. I go running for the football, gonna kick it for sure this time, you betcha. And every time I wind up on my back in the grass, wondering what the fuck happened.
At least the sky's pretty today, innit?
I made an explanatory graphic for dressage land so that I could look at it regularly to remind myself that I was still progressing...
... but it doesn't make me feel any better. It should make me feel better, but it does not.
At any rate, in pursuit of DLB clinic fitness, I have been working hard to get more days on Bird, with an eye to overall fitness. He needs days off to recover from the work but he also needs a regular and progressive schedule of work to get FIT ENOUGH to do the work. Like, we can't do much clinic work on lift in canter if the boy is whipped after like three canter efforts. He needs to be fit enough to do many canter efforts, in Fancy Canter, so that DLB can see us do it and offer helpful advice.
Fancy Canter is our current work project for DLB. Like, that's the thing that we are supposed to be working on at the moment. Last time we saw DLB, the homework was Fancy Canter.
Bird's fitness needs to be both aerobic and muscular. So we're working on that. Aerobic fitness through hill marches and trot sets. Muscular fitness from lateral work, fancy trot and fancy canter to work the abs. Bird is reasonably fit for regular everyday riding. He can lope along happily and not be dead. He doesn't ever get that thick white foam between his back legs (like you do when you ride an unfit horse in work on a hot day). When he sweats, it's thin and clear... and he can do a fair amount of work before he starts to sweat, especially if it's not hot/humid out. His strength is improving for Fancy Canter and he can do more efforts (and each effort is longer) before deflating. Will it be enough? I don't know. I never know.
Right now (a month out) we're doing about three different sorts of workout. All workouts start with about fifteen minutes of walk and relaxed trot to get things online. Horse isn't asked for actual work of any sort until he's lightly warm to the touch and "smells like a horse".
(We're using the dirt track around the copse of trees right now for our field work because the hay is too tall to be ridden on at the moment. Once the hay is cut, we will be back to doing more strictly-field work in the field.)
Type 1: Canter work. Fancy Canter, alternating lead and direction around the copse, for as long as fancy canter holds out. When horse deflates out of Fancy Canter (it feels like his hind legs start trailing behind) then we walk the rest of the circuit, turn around, and try the other lead until it fails similarly. Walk rest of circuit, trot a full lap in a nice midrange trot (he actually recovers during this part), and then repeat from start of cantering effort. Do until horse has no Fancy Canter left. Right now, this is about six efforts. Each effort lasts about 2/3 of the long side of the copse. By the time we're done both he and I are sweating. Fancy Canter is a lot of work for both of us. (He can't do it if I'm faffing about up there. I have to have a good, consistent, quiet position so that I don't get in his way or there is no Fancy Canter at all. It takes abs from me, too.) There's no point to doing more canter than he can do in Fancy Canter. BAD canter efforts do not use the muscles we are trying to build, so we do not do bad canter efforts. Currently he gets two days of canter work per week.
Type 2: Lateral work. We are currently working on leg yield, shoulder in, and haunches in at walk and trot. He can leg yield in canter but not shoulder in or haunches in in canter yet. Not enough abs. So, we do lateral work at walk and trot, mostly trot now that he understands the concepts, in a variety of exercises... from "trot in straight line doing the thing" to "Please to be doing three trots of haunches-in-left then three straight trots then three trots of haunches-in-right" or "Shoulder-in bent to the left for four then haunches-in bent to the left for four then back to shoulder-in to the left for four". We warm up on the straight line stuff of just "do the thing" at what I think of as his basic speed before asking for change-up stuff or "do the thing" in a bigger, brighter trot. Change-up stuff is hard and requires balance and precision from him... like, I want the shifts to be snappy and clear. He really has to maintain a nicely balanced trot to do them. Oddly, haunches-in left and right swaps are way easier for him than shoulder-in left and right swaps. I think it's because he needs to shift more weight rearward to be able to flip the shoulder-in shape left and right. He struggles with that but is improving... and I might be wrong about why it's hard for him. Again, like with Fancy Canter, after a while I can feel him deflating to where he's not got it anymore. When he's struggling to do a decent effort, we quit. I work laterals pretty hard one day of the week.
Type 3: Road work. Road work is walk and trot on the shoulder of the hard road. There are cars. He's pretty solid at traffic, though, and we don't use a super busy road anyway. It has some nice solid hills which we BRISKLY MARCH UP. (Briskly marching up hills works the cardio harder while also being easier on the joints than trotting.) We trot some of the nicer flat sections. There is only enough lateral work on road work days to keep him on the shoulder of the road, so the occasional leg yield over. The basic road work effort is to the covered bridge stop sign and back, about four miles. If desired, I can add another 1.6 miles including another fairly beefy hill. Road work days are something of a break from the endless ab grind that is fucking dressage and I'm trying to get two days of road work in per week.
Some clinician once asked me what "dressage" meant to me. I had, at that juncture, an insufficient grasp of the concept and put forth some useless bullshit answer. I probably STILL have an insufficient grasp of the concept, but now my insufficient grasp is such that "dressage" means Your Horse Needs More Abs.
Bird gets two days off a week to not-work. He does better with days off. Endless no-days-off and ride-every-day makes him flat and unenthusiastic. On days off, we go across the road and hand graze in the tall grass for an hour or so while I read a book on my phone. (It's nicer grass than is in his field, which is kind of gnawed down. He has good hay in his field because the grass is not great, but he prefers grass. Hand grazing in the tall grass is a treat for him.)
So those are the things that we're doing to add fitness to Bird so that he can survive two days of DLB clinic wherein I make an effort to get further direction on our Fancy Canter.
I can hear you now... Where is the montage? I was promised a training montage!
It was a with-words montage. You just read it. There are no pictures. Sorry. There is also no inspirational music.
I do think it's working, though. Saddle fitter came and went (Finally!!) and da Birb is now in the Wide/XW (orange) gullet bar for his Thorowgood. (He started in a blue. Then he was a red. Now he's an orange.) Up a tree size in the course of a year... he's building something.
