The Tyranny of the Left Rein

It's been a really good week of riding, but I think both Selten and myself are a bit tired. As a case in point--I got home from the barn a little after 16:00, and after doing a few small things around the house, laid down on the couch, and promptly zonked out for about 45 minutes. I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, according to FitBit, I've burned an average of 3000 calories a day, and have almost certainly not consumed anywhere close to that many. Even with all the candy and cupcakes I've been eating. (They're all gone now, in case you were wondering. And for the record--they were delicious.) I woke up later than I intended, 07:00 instead of 05:30 (Oops. But... I'm on vacation?), and made it to the barn just before 09:00, and brought Selten up, and started tacking.

Happily, Christine asked me what I wanted to work on today, and as I noted in yesterday's entry, I asked that we work on turn on the forehand, turn on the haunches, and reinback.

Ok, also: is it rein back, or reinback?!?

Just checked the USDF 2-3 test. It's rein back.

Now that that's settled, onto the lesson. We started out working turn on the forehand on the left rein, and, put mildly... it did not go terribly well. At the moment, turn on the forehand is hands down my weakest movement, and while I always kind of suspected why, today it was made very, very plain. Which for sure was frustrating, but by breaking the movement down piece by piece, (and, candidly, still failing to successfully execute the movement), I've identified several issues to fix.

1. I am trying to make the movement happen with my hands, especially on the left rein, which is his harder side.
2. My left leg goes completely MIA, so I'm not helping him execute the movement at all.
3. I'm not making enough of a distinction between my leg being at the girth, ahead of the girth, and behind the girth
4. The left wrist is at it again. I noticed that whenever I get frustrated, or am trying to make something happen, my left wrist almost immediately starts curling in, and the rein comes across the neck, which of course only further impedes what I am trying to do. Then I get tense in my upper body, then the horse gets tense, etc.
5. I tend to try and make the whole turn happen, rather than being content to get a step or two.

To shake these issues out, Christine had me walk down the quarterline, and leg yield the shoulders in, and once I was in that position, bring his haunches towards the rail. Pretty much immediately, the issues highlighted above started making themselves apparent one-by-one. Job #1 is to stop curling my wrist, and keeping my inside rein hand low and open. Since the barn will be gone next week at championships, I intend to spend a lot of time working on the exercise of leg yielding the shoulders to the center, and bringing the haunches around while staying out of my hands.

There's not too much to report on the rein back today. I made a few incremental improvements in making sure to use leg rather than reins to make him back up, and got a little better about making the differences in my seat clearer between "back up" and "walk off". I do need to come into the halt more straight with more impulsion, but that's going to continue to be a work in progress.

So, all in all, a good lesson. A bit frustrating at points when my brain couldn't make my body do what I knew I needed to, but that's just going to come with more time and reps. It was just a year ago that I was having no end of trouble with walk/canter, and generally keeping my horse straight. Just keep grinding, don't beat myself up too much, and a year from now, I'll likely have a completely different set of nagging issues. Such is the way with Dressage, it seems. And on that note, over the past year, or so, I've noticed a very definite shift in my overall mindset in how I approach Dressage. It's all about the training and improvement, not the hardware and satin from the shows. What was good enough today, is not going to be good enough tomorrow. And, I'll be working on riding inside leg to outside rein my entire career, I'll just be doing slightly fancier stuff while I'm doing so.

Not gonna lie, though... I definitely enjoy seeing all my ribbons when I walk into the guest room, and drinking wine out of my first place HDS wine glasses. As for tomorrow, I think the plan is to do a training session where Christine rides for half of it, and I ride for the other.