Remembering How To Ride

Riding

Awareness of the outside world. Alabama News Center: Alabama quilters escape to Lay Lake for ‘Building Better Quilts 2021’, By Meg McKinney, October 12, 2021.

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At some point, I will expand my repertoire to riding a wider range of ASBs at Stepping Stone Farm once again (small shudder). For my lesson last week, I deliberately asked to ride Optimus. I wanted to see if I could take less than three classes to remember how to ride saddle seat. [Switching Gears]

Get ready. I tried to consciously consider the fact that I was wearing jods and using a different saddle as markers to put myself in saddle seat headspace before I got on.

Get on. Remember where to put body parts. [Gears]

In motion. That’s the hard part. My understanding(?) is that one is constantly asking the horse to compress the stride and lift the feet. Therefore, I figured that if I was asking the horse to do this, the rider should be doing analogous things with their body. [Learning From Youth]

Overall, successful. I was not perfect, but I was not perfect within tolerances for a saddle seat rider, rather than a rider orbiting in from another discipline.

Which raises the question if the riding style I revert to is actually hunt seat or simply a collection of sloppy habits and real hunter/jumper/dressage/eventing is closer to the things that trip me up in saddle seat, i.e. sit up, sit back, constantly gather the horse, etc. etc. Isn’t all riding about the center of gravity? But that’s a post for another day. [Center of Gravity, Notes From A Lesson]

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Well, done with that for a while. [Bored]

Onwards!
Katherine