Nine Lessons

For anyone relatively new to the blog, it might not be known that I used to be a dressage trainer! I have been teaching since I was a kid, just fifteen years old when I got my first student- a kid whose grandparents lived next door and who didn't have any budget for lessons. I charged ten dollars for an hour lesson and I WAS TERRIBLE.

Fast forward eight or so years, and I was teaching/riding full time and flunking out of college because who has time for that (don't worry, I now have my Master's degree). I said fuck it to college, and dropped out to press forward full time.

Fast forward a little while longer, and I was super burnt out. I wasn't good at the business side of it, felt major impostor syndrome so wasn't good at advertising, and had a few accidents on client horses that led me back to school. Through the rest of my undergrad I kept my full time job, but coming into grad school I slowly wittled down my students- not taking on new ones- until last year I had my last one leave for college after riding at the PSG level (see, I got better) and I was all done.

The neighbor cows are back at my parents' place, I love them

I do miss it sometimes though, and I feel so incredibly lucky that Kate has brought me out to her barn to teach a bit. And that's what I was doing all day Sunday!

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Kate's students are super fun to teach! Their basics are solid, they take instruction really well, and they don't seem to mind when I make them work really REALLY hard because I'm past the point of wanting people to like me when I'm teaching them. Not mean, just, uh demanding.

It was a super good day. Nine lessons was really ambitious and my voice hurts SO MUCH, but it was a blast. Pretty much everyone had good lessons, no one cried or fell off, and I only took one pair of stirrups away. Everyone did kind of stay on a 20 meter circle because I'm that trainer, but Kate said she'd let them all off the circle this coming week.

Kate also lets me jump her ponies in addition to tormenting her
children! This was from last winter, I taught a kid on this pony
at the clinic and let's just say that the kid was real sticky

Some themes I found myself repeating were the idea that every movement you do on the horse should improve the horse. It isn't good enough that the transition was quiet or that the horse stayed on the bit, the connection/throughness/etc MUST improve into the next gait. The shoulder-in must improve the horse, the canter to trot transition must improve the horse, and so on. It's hard though! A lot of the time our attention to detail is dependent on what it looks like rather than what it feels like.

I also kept talking about recycling energy. Generating energy with the hind legs, sending that energy over the back, and recycling some of it backwards back to the hind legs with the seat (dependent on how much weight is in the seat vs the thigh) and letting some flow forward to let the horse cover ground and put the horse on the bit. It was really fun with a few riders to play with the different seats and see how the biomechanic of the hind leg changed based on how much energy was being recycled back (more = more carrying, less = more pushing).

I miss riding this guy so much, he was the best lesson horse

Kate's students sit pretty well so not too many students got drilled on position. One thing I dug into because I had JUST read about it in Academic Horsemanship was the weight in the stirrups. Kate told me that Tracey had told her that there shouldn't be so much weight in the stirrups where someone couldn't tap the stirrups off the rider's foot. I liked that visual. I KNOW I ride a bit shoved into the ankle at times and I was basically projecting as I told a couple kids to pick their feet up and quit shoving the heel down.

I always end up going on and on about the canter mechanic since that was such a hard thing for me to learn. Pull the seat back in the saddle, press the front of your body up to an invisible piece of glass, become a carousel pole with your upper body, follow the oscilation of the neck (or the inside front leg if the neck is stuck) with the elbow swinging, not just opening and closing, provide structure for the horse by tightening in the core and, with a rider who wanted to get their elbow pushed forward, between the shoulder blades.

This guy not so much, I've had one of my bronze
meadlists on him and he wasn't great. He was good
for Kate though!

Teaching is something I miss so so so much about my new life. As much as it's made me so much happier to be focusing completely on TC and not feel so burned out about riding my own horse, I do remember very vividly how much I loved getting up every day and helping improve people's riding. I love my job and love the regular paycheck it provides, if money wasn't an issue, I'd for sure be teaching at least part time. Just enough to scratch that itch but not so much to burn me out.

So once again, major thanks to Kate for not only providing me with the opportunity to teach (including advertising, setting the schedule, and collecting money for me- three things I'm terrible at), but also providing me with SUPER FUN KIDS to teach.