I have asked one of my clients with her green showmanship horse to demonstrate a little for us (and you'll have to excuse my novice photography). In this first photo please examine our exhibitor and her horse...they are riddled with problems...
- The exhibitor's shoulder has dropped back
- The horse's neck is bent and thus dropping it's shoulder
- The exhibitor's hand is leading towards the nose instead of the cheek
This exhibitor can help herself by aligning her shoulders so that they are parallel to her horse's head. What she is doing is encouraging too MUCH forward momentum, so her horse is not actually pivoting and she's encouraging the horse to bend it's neck.In the photo below, the exhibitor has aligned her shoulders so her shoulders and body are parallel to the horse and see what happened with the horse's neck? It straightened, no more dropped shoulder! Her hands are now in the correct position. The only thing I would correct here is that her horse is just a touch too far away (the horse is pivoting faster than the exhibitor can keep up with), however we're still playing with chain length, so we're aware of this...
Other things to consider:
- Speed of your pivot, pivot too slow and it's difficult to keep one foot on the ground (try it...hold ONE of your feet on the ground and spin sl.ow.ly...now spin a little faster...which is easier? the moderately faster, now spin faster...takes more balance doesn't it...keep that in mind when you ask your horse to pivot).
- Make sure YOUR circle is even...a horse can't hold it's pivot if YOU are making an oval... Think of your horse's pivot foot as the stable point of a compass and you're the pencil.
Horse STILL dropping it's shoulder even if your body position is correct? In the next few days I'll have another tutorial with a "fix"...be but aware, it's not a quick fix, it'll take quite some practicing.
3 comments:
Thanks for the awesome tips! I recognized a similar problem with my old horse and I was actually pushing him back instead of forward with my body position. Thus, he would step out of the pivot. Once I brought more forward momentum and body positioning it was a quick fix! Thanks for reminding us on these problems that can be fixed with simply our own positioning!
could a problem with positioning/posture also result in a horse pivoting on the incorrect hind hoof? If not, what causes this?
flormanr, two different things could be going on with pivoting on the wrong pivot foot. I highly suspect that the horse is being pushed BACK, thus making it impossible for the horse to pivot on the correct (horse's right hind) foot. A spin is a forward motion and many times people PUSH THEIR horses BACKWARDS, to correct this you would pull your horse forward as it spins. The SECOND scenario could be the horse is bending it's neck and taking the easy way out... to straighten out a neck, WHILE spinning, tap it's shoulder (I personally use a dressage whip, this way I can use my correct lead hand and the whip reaches...I only TAP...not whip! a tap is more than enough to capture the horse's attention). I hope this has helped....
Post a Comment