Mike Bridges Clinic and weight shift (again !)

Yesterday we went to see the Mike Bridges clinic just west of Birmingham. It was great to see so many familiar faces we have grown up with in the Parelli world there. I think Pat would have been proud as well. He always says that his program provides the foundation and then we should branch out and seek good instructors in whatever discipline we wish to follow. The knowledge Parelli provided lead me to the Bridle Horse discipline, which I love, and Mike is one of the best instructors in the world for that. Along with Buck I guess, but less well known and therefore a little more accessible.

The format of the clinic was the usual format of a set of riders in the morning and a different set in the afternoon. It was great watching David Zund riding on his little Spanish mare. I was stunned to learn later that the mare is 20 years old !! She was easily the best performing horse all day, but then she had David on board ;)

During the clinic I was getting thoroughly confused about weight shift again, especially after what I had learnt in Montana. So I sought out Mike during the lunch break for some clarification.
He said that what I had learnt in Montana was good for a juvenile horse just learning to move with our aids as it made it super obvious where to go. However it also caused them trouble with regaining balance after the move. So weighting the outside stirrup during a fore quarter turn did make it obvious to move the shoulders away from that side but once the horses legs had moved that way then they would struggle to regain balance. So what I was told in Montana was a way of getting the movement started in a horse that was still in the training phase but not appropriate for a more advanced horse.

Then he came up with what he called the golden rule which comes from classical dressage.
"Move your seat in the direction of travel and over the engaged leg"

He gave the example of a leg yield. If leg yielding to the left then your seat needed to move over to the left side of the horse. That confused me because the most engaged leg in the leg yield is the right hind. But he said the right hind should be stretching across under the mid line of the horse so your weight should be over where that engaged leg is going to strike the ground which is again to the left of the mid line.

I asked about how to position my weight for hind quarter disengagement. He looked a little aghast and asked why on earth I would want to teach the horse to disengage. Everything should be about engagement. I take his point and maybe for a rider of his calibre that is fair enough.
For me I want to be sure that I can quickly disengage the hind legs of Filly. She is a race horse and hates cows at the moment so for me that is a safety issue even if it reduces her performance a little.

Montana Holiday Part 3 : Weight Distribution

One of the reasons for going on to this ranch was to be able to ride with people who had been brought up around the form of horsemanship we are studying. One of those people was Ben.

Ben is, I believe, around 34 years old and has been riding all his life. He has ridden with many of the great horsemen such as Ronnie Willis, Buck Brannaman, Martin Black etc etc. He made a living for many years as a travelling cowboy working on a variety of ranches.

This has lead him to be exposed to many styles of riding in the western tradition. For example he can describe and demonstrate the difference between the Nevada, Texas and Californio style. He also described the reasons that each style originated in each area. Often down to climate it turns out.

If you are riding in the Californio style then you probably have more time as the climate is more predictable than the Texas style where the job has to be done now before the afternoon storms hit.

So I was pretty keen to ride with Ben and was lucky enough to have some one on one tuition with him. For this he either rode his finished bridle horse or maybe his developing hackemore horse.

What I really learnt from Ben was to be a more active rider. Coming from the UK we are used to sitting pretty square in the saddle and central. Hands are kept fairly low and central. From James Roberts, Josh and others I had learnt that maybe when developing a horse in a hackemore the hands need to be more active but Ben put some refinement on that.

To start with the riders weight in the saddle is the main cue for the horse, but we all know that already. What is less clear is how to distribute that weight for a particular manoeuvre. Lets take the simple hind quarter yield as an example.

Say we want to move the horses right hind leg under their body so we get a hind quarter yield to the left. If you watch this in the Parelli program you will see the rider lean a little forward and look down and back to the right hind leg. It appears that the riders weight in now over the right front leg.
However Ben showed me that actually you want to weight the left front leg so you put some of your weight in the left stirrup which has moved forwards a little. You do then look down and back at the right hind leg whilst moving your right leg back to ask for the yield. So weight is on your left leg, but intention is down the right side of the horse.
He explained that to achieve this I needed to bend my body to the right so that it felt as though my left side was stretching and my right ribs were crunched together. To an observer is might well look like I had leant to the right and weighted the right stirrup but that was not the case.

For a fore quarter yield to the right we want the weight over the left hind leg a little. So I need to weight the left stirrup with it slightly forward and lift my inside shoulder higher than the outside shoulder. )In fact this inside shoulder/hand being higher than the outside hand/shoulder was a common theme for many moves.) Then open out the right leg to make space for the horse to move into and close the left leg on or just in front of the girth.

The timing of the pressure and release for either manoeuvre must of course been in time with the horses feet but I trust by now that is taken as read ;)

What really interested me was the position of the inside hand during all this. When teaching a young horse this could be so high is was almost vertical off the nose. If the horse didn't respond to a cue don't pull harder, lift !
Watch Buck ride and you'll occasionally see this as well.

Backup was also interesting as to the body position. I had always thought, wrongly, that the weight needed to be a little back in the saddle to help the backup. However Ben said that was incorrect. Slightly back is to stop. To backup the weight should come up and forward a little into much the same position as a forward walk or sitting trot. However the legs come forward of the position for walk and trot. Having heard this I went and looked at Bucks 7 Clinics section on backing and that is exactly what he says in that.

Maria, Bens wife, neatly summarised the weight position for the fore quarter and hind quarter yields as "but your weight on the side of the horse opposite to the side their head has bent to". Makes it easy to remember for me !

Back at home riding Filly all this knowledge has made a difference, especially on the hind quarter yields. She would do them in the past but with a lot of tail swishing. She'll do them now with a quiet tail and is probably quietly thanking Ben for finally telling me what she has be yelling at me for for years.