Read Online Horse Crazy by Susan Kiernan-Lewis - Free Book Online Page B

calm.
    Your position on the horse should be:
    1. Heels down
    2. Toes in
    3. Legs back
    4. Hips pushed forward
    5. Seat bones felt
    6. Back relaxed
    7. Shoulders straight
    8. Neck relaxed
    9. Eyes forward
    10. Hands still
    All right, it's not that simple. And if you
do none of these things and can still stay on consistently (plus
have fun), great! An old newspaper photo of Jackie Onassis riding
to foxes, showed her leg forward and her heels not down. Obviously
Jackie O knew how to ride so perhaps failing to have
picture-perfect seat isn't as bad as armed conflict in the Middle
East. It's at least possible.
    To indicate to the horse that you want to
move forward, you should lightly squeeze him with your calves. (In
some cases, this requires an accompanying stick of dynamite.)
    Turning him differs depending on whether you
are riding English-style or Western. In the case of Western, you
neck-rein by pulling the reins in one hand, across the horse's neck
in the direction you wish to go.
    English-style requires that you pull back on
one rein only--the one closest to the direction you wish to
turn--and touch the horse behind the girth with your opposite
leg.
    To stop, you apply pressure to the reins and
sit down solidly in the saddle. Yelling "whoa!" doesn't hurt
either. Some horses won't stop when you ask them to and then it's
necessary to ask them a little more emphatically. This is done by
various methods. Pulling harder on the reins is one way. Steering
them into a side of a barn is another way popular with many
frustrated riders.
    Now that you can balance yourself, keep
yourself more or less in position, walk, turn and stop, you should
be aware of the horse's other gaits. Each has its own pleasures,
benefits, nuances.
    The trot is a pace of two-time where the legs
of the horse all move in diagonal pairs almost simultaneously. (Got
a clear picture of that?) English-style riding asks that the rider
post, or rise to the trot, which is a way of relieving the horse of
some of your weight at a point when both the horse's inner legs
come together under him. (This rising up also helps relieve the
rider of the typically-jarring effects of this particular
gait.)
    It's all managed by heaving yourself out of
the saddle and settling softly back into it in a sort of one-two,
one-two, up and down action.
    The heaving action--which comes from your
knees--is done by thrusting your hips forward, much as if you were
shoving a book onto a table with your pelvis (as you no doubt do
from time to time, right?) Keep your elbows in, with your
hands--although steady--moving back and forth with the horse's
head.
    The trot is not typically the most
comfortable of gaits.
    The Western counterpart to this gait is
called the jog. The horse handles his part the same as his English
cousin, but the Western rider simply sits to the trot and lets his
big, comfy saddle absorb a good deal of the shock of the gait.
There's not a whole lot of information on what this does for the
horse.
    A "canter," which is the English-style term,
is an exquisite gait, very smooth and comfortable to ride. It is a
pace of three time in which the near hind foot hits the ground
first, then the near fore and off hind hit together, and finally
the off fore leg--which, in this case, would be the leading leg.
Got it? Now, of course, if the near fore leg leads, then the off
hind leg will hit first, and the off fore and near hind will thump
down in unison. But you probably already deduced that.
    To manage it all, the rider sits up very
straight, or fractionally forward, heels down, toes in, hands
quiet, eyes forward and rides with the horse. The rider's seat
should feel glued to the saddle and the hands should move back and
forth with the horse's head.
    Called a "lope" in Western lingo, the horse
behaves much the same, but the rider usually tends to lean very far
forward, arms akimbo, while emitting piercing, drawn-out sounds
such as "Yaa-hoo" and "Yee-hah."
    One exercise that's particularly