A chilled Filly

Saturday 21 November 2015

Bridleless with a purpose

Yesterday I had a very interesting and fun ride on Filly. I've been working on circles in corners and to be honest they haven't been going that well. Coming out of the corner Filly showed a marked reluctance to go back into the corner again. She wanted to head off across the school to the corner nearest her stable and stand there. She had become barn sweet.
I worked for some time in the bosal on the circle. The principle in my mind was to make my inside hand stay on the track I had in mind. So if she drifted out on the circle I took my hand further and further to the inside so that my hand stayed near the track I wanted to be on. Being a bosal if she pushed into the hand I bumped her lightly with the bosal to bring her around. Never apply steady pressure with a bosal is one of the prime directives to riding in one. I don't mean hard tugs, just light bumps.
This was working to a degree but she still drifted sideways out of the circle in the direction she wanted to go in. I needed her to stop pushing through my outside leg and stay between both my reins and my legs.
The best way to stop her pushing through my leg would be to back up the leg pressure with pressure from something else, like a coil of rope. If she then tries to push through my leg I can tap the coil of rope on my leg until she comes off the leg. If she persists then I move the coil forwards and tap her neck. All done in a progressive manner with time for each phase to take effect. You have to have a very relaxed attitude as to where she is actually going in the school for this to work ! Don't worry about the circle.
So I needed to isolate the yielding to the leg as this was now the primary problem. I felt the best way to achieve this was to remove the reins. Then I couldn't accidentally apply unwanted cues on the reins and the signal from me leg/seat would be purer. So off came the bosal and reins and out came the 45 foot rope split into separate coils for the left and right hands. Neutral is just having my hands relaxed by my sides. Active is lifting up a set of coils and moving them to a position where I can tap my leg (phase 1), tapping my leg (phase 2), moving the coils forwards to tap her neck (phase 3 and 4).

I started by forgetting about the circle in the corner and just wandering around the school occasionally asking for just a step over with the front legs then back to wandering around randomly again. Slowly we established (again :( ) what my outside leg meant and she would step over nicely. So back to the circle.

To start with she again pushed away from the circle and into my leg, but slowly she started to come around on the circle closer to where I wanted us to be. I had markers set out on the ground to define a perfect circle in the corner so I could easily tell that things were improving. Then we picked up a trot and a remarkable thing happened. She suddenly accepted the circle and with no asking from me, I had no reins, she also came into vertical flexion. This was after quite a long period of trotting and I think she figured this was an easier way to travel so adopted it.

With that I jumped off her, whilst still on the circle, and made a fuss of her. Saddle off and she went for a nice roll.

I see on videos many many folks riding bridleless as it is a cool fun thing to do. And it is. I love it myself.
I do wonder how many people also think of bridleless riding as an important tool in our arsenal. One that can take us right back to basics and ask the question "is the horse listening to my body or just being pulled around by the reins ?". It was of course James, and latterly Josh, who have impressed this on me. But maybe last night the lesson finally sank in.

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