We are delighted to host Sally Cousins as our newest guest blogger, as she shares her wealth of knowledge with us in the form of weekly training tips. We hope these nuggets of information can be integrated directly into your program at home and can influence the way you ride and train your horses. Be sure to check out both the Sally Cousins Eventing website and keep up with her on Facebook.
Photo by Kasey Mueller
When a mistake happens when we are jumping or doing dressage, it is not necessarily that we used the wrong aid, but sometimes the degree or the timing of the aid was off. If we jump into a line that is short, and we get down the line too quickly, we may have used the correct aid to make the horse wait, but we may have been too late to ask or didn’t ask strongly enough.
In a line that we know is riding long, if we wait too long to move down the line, the horse may add an extra stride. This means the timing of our aid was late. We may also make the mistake of using too much aid to get down the line and push the horse past the distance to the fence. This means the degree of aid we used was too much.
It is very important when we have lessons to learn new aids. It is just as important to get feedback from our instructors about how much and when to use the aids. Once we get to a certain point in our riding, we still learn new aids, but the majority of our time spent in lessons is working on improving the degree and timing of our aids.
The challenge of riding is that for each horse the amount of aid we need and when to use the aid is different. The aids we need to use on a horse can vary even day to day. On my horses, when it is windy and cold, I often need a lot less leg aid than when it is really hot. It is why when we warm a horse up for any phase we need to do transitions into and out of the gaits and within the gaits themselves to get feedback about the responses we can expect that day.
