Trainer 1, Student 0

I got my butt kicked in my lesson today. My lessons make me wish I was six inches taller. I'm trying to stretch my legs down, engage my core muscles and maintain a tall upper body to help Werther balance. Meanwhile, I still have to  loosen my elbows to move my hands with the motion of the horse, while still keeping my hands low so Werther has somewhere to move into the contact, and still keep my head up and look where I'm going. I feel like I'm being stretched like gumby. Werther was so lazy, he could have very well been "pokey" to take the analogy further. We spent the majority of the time working on my position and trying to get the timing of everything right. We also worked at getting Werther to move off the leg, so he does not use his shoulder to fall in. Werther spent most of the lesson trying to convince me he could not move forward and in a frame at the same time. I kept having to give him corrections with the hip because he was not responding to my leg and that was throwing my timing off. Also, we worked on posting over the hindquarters to help Werther balance, which is difficult for me because I am used to hunter posting where you are trying to be really light and almost going off of your pubic bone. Sarah said that post farther back helps the horse to balance, which makes sense to me, if you are using the energy from their hindquarters, that should be a lot less energy that has to be created and a lot less interference with the horse. Since I have not had a video up here in a while, I thought I would offer a gumby video to refresh everyones memory, embedded video is not cooperating so click HERE and enjoy!

PS, Sarah said Werther was good on Monday, she worked on getting him to move off of his hind end.