Exercise junkie
Aug. 5th, 2007 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI have to admit I'm feeling rather pleased with myself right now. I got up early this morning, walked two miles to the stables, rode the biggest horse I've ever ridden round the field for an hour, then walked two miles back up the hill to the flat - and I feel great!
The lesson was brilliant, too, despite the fact that my horse tried to bolt twice, and then bit me on the leg at the end. He was a huge piebald called Herbie and he was good fun, though quite tiriing to ride. Abbey is big but slender, so she's tiring to ride but she glides in trot and canter. Herbie is big and chunky, so he lollops in trot and canter and is quite exhausting.
We did a fun exercise where we rode round in a smaller and smaller circle and then did leg yield to increase the circle size again. This is the same exercise we did last week down the three-quarter line, only I couldn't remember what it was called then. It's when you keep the horse facing straight and push them out with your inside leg so their feet cross over and the end up moving diagonally without actually changing direction. It wasn't easy getting Herbie to do it, since he was all over the place on the circle in the first place, so getting him in the right position to move outwards was quite a challenge. At one point, though, I shifted my weight, put my hands in the right place at last, got right flexion, nudged him outwards and he executed a perfect leg yield out onto a bigger circle. Of course, Kelly was looking in completely the wrong direction at the time, so she didn't see it, but Herbie and I know we did it!
Then, we practised standing up in our stirrups in trot. Now, sitting to the trot is hard enough - standing up and trying to stay up is infinitely harder! It would be completely impossible to do it on B class horses, because they'd just drop down into walk, since you can't use leg aids while you're standing up. It felt really weird, but it was fun.
Then came the best bit of the lesson. We spread out into a bigger circle in trot and then cantered up the hill every time we got round to the far side. We all just kept going round and round, making the circle bigger and bigger so we could get a longer canter in on each circuit, and it was brilliant. We did it on both reins, so we got about fifteen or so canter stretches each. The horses were all really keen so there was no difficulty getting them into canter, and Kelly just let us get on with it.
I love A lessons!
The lesson was brilliant, too, despite the fact that my horse tried to bolt twice, and then bit me on the leg at the end. He was a huge piebald called Herbie and he was good fun, though quite tiriing to ride. Abbey is big but slender, so she's tiring to ride but she glides in trot and canter. Herbie is big and chunky, so he lollops in trot and canter and is quite exhausting.
We did a fun exercise where we rode round in a smaller and smaller circle and then did leg yield to increase the circle size again. This is the same exercise we did last week down the three-quarter line, only I couldn't remember what it was called then. It's when you keep the horse facing straight and push them out with your inside leg so their feet cross over and the end up moving diagonally without actually changing direction. It wasn't easy getting Herbie to do it, since he was all over the place on the circle in the first place, so getting him in the right position to move outwards was quite a challenge. At one point, though, I shifted my weight, put my hands in the right place at last, got right flexion, nudged him outwards and he executed a perfect leg yield out onto a bigger circle. Of course, Kelly was looking in completely the wrong direction at the time, so she didn't see it, but Herbie and I know we did it!
Then, we practised standing up in our stirrups in trot. Now, sitting to the trot is hard enough - standing up and trying to stay up is infinitely harder! It would be completely impossible to do it on B class horses, because they'd just drop down into walk, since you can't use leg aids while you're standing up. It felt really weird, but it was fun.
Then came the best bit of the lesson. We spread out into a bigger circle in trot and then cantered up the hill every time we got round to the far side. We all just kept going round and round, making the circle bigger and bigger so we could get a longer canter in on each circuit, and it was brilliant. We did it on both reins, so we got about fifteen or so canter stretches each. The horses were all really keen so there was no difficulty getting them into canter, and Kelly just let us get on with it.
I love A lessons!
