Less burning, more learning

Just rode the one horse saturday. I rode Papillon bareback while Alyssa rode lady. Papillon was having a bad day arthritis-wise. When she finally got that through her head she was much more willing to work under my direction. Trot only on the long sides, round your back more, nice smooth transitions. Normally Papillon will round up at the walk and canter without my asking as long as I'm sitting basically correctly. At the trot, first I dont always sit quite as correctly as I'd like, and second Papillon is very unforgiving. On a bad day though, I think I will continue to insist that she do the right thing and ease the weight on her front end.
I have perfected the mounting without rolling the bareback pad, and even though the girth on the pad came undone it didn't move an inch while we were riding, it just made Alyssa twitch a little. I really like that bareback pad, its cushy and fuzzy for high friction.

Most of the day was spent grilling Robert on his training ideas. You have to grill him if you want an efficient flow of information. He has a vast warehouse of information at his disposal, but the retrieval can be a little inconsistent. Lucky for me he's "going back to basics" with Reno to re-establish better bending and balance. To do this he's doing something I've been curious about for a while, namely, rollbacks. He's doing them on longlines and manages to keep Reno, stiff as he is, to keep his hind end mostly in place. At this point the rollbacks seem to be mostly turns on the hind end, but that is OK with me if it gets the job done.

I think I'll be pretty successful in getting Robert to teach me how this is done. Then I can practice on Reno and on poor Colonel, bwa ha ha ha ha. Supposedly Colonel knows how to do this. We shall see.

This next part is where I try to hash out what Robert and I are discussing. Its technical (I hope) so feel free to skip it.

Right now Robert is on a big kick about The Wither. I'm taking this to mean more physiologically thoracic vertebrae 1 through 8 or so. We've been talking about the lateral ark of The Wither. I'm going to represent it with ( and ) for pointing left and right respectively. The idea is that if the whither points left ( then the horse will go forward to the right because that is the way that they are bent.

Those of us who ride are painfully aware that a horse can have his neck bent to the right and still quite easily go left by poking out his left shoulder and dropping his right shoulder and away he goes! To my mind this is prevented by having the wither longitudinally balanced straight up and down. Then they cant drop the inside shoulder. I'm not really clear on this part. Maybe its an issue of the wither being more exaggerating of course, due to the limits of the symbols available to me. We all know they can do a leg yield bent smoothly in the opposite direction of travel. They can do a sidepass bent in the same direction of travel. ( I may have this backwards, but, no matter.) Maybe they have their wither straight | and are just bending their neck in front of the wither? I will have to clarify this more on tuesday.