(“Various instructor/clinicians . . . have ridden the horse I brought to them.”)
Got myself all worked up this morning reading an on-line thread which grew out of another instructor’s blog. The topic was whether an instructor/clinician should get on a student’s horse in a lesson. The prevailing opinion was “no.” Reasons listed: The guy is just being lazy. Make him bother to explain to you how to do it . . . No matter how different he makes your horse feel , he’ll will just revert back to his former state . . . Male instructors are strong and aggressive and might hurt/scare/or otherwise mess up my horse. And so on.
I agree that if the clinician only gets on the horses and schools them without explaining what he’s doing, that’s cheating. But generally speaking I am totally in favor of getting on a student’s horse at appropriate times. In the main if someone doesn’t trust me on her horse, I don’t want to teach her. These comments are specifically related to dressage schooling, by the way. If it’s gymnastics or show jumping or cross country, I can lean the other way and endorse alternative ground-based coaching solutions.
The relationship to the aids which we’re trying to generate in your horse, however, is so much more intense and nuanced that sometimes it simply demands that the instructor helps explain it to him. That a student can be verbally directed to communicate to her horse feelings which she herself has never felt and which are totally foreign to the horse is laughably unlikely. A rider who hasn’t felt the real thing just has no idea how her superficially obedient horse is sleepwalking through the movements beneath her, hence the title of this blog. How alert? How responsive to the seat or leg? How through? How able to be rebalanced? How is she supposed to know?
Over the years various instructor/clinicians (Mike Poulin, Karin Schlüter, Herwig Radnutter, Hans Wikne) have ridden the horse I brought to them. True, over the following days the feelings each put into him dissipated, but each gave me a better sense of what I was looking for as I worked to recreate what they’d shown me.
On the flip side, while helping me with canter pirouettes years ago Swedish Olympian Louise Nathhorst climbed on my horse, and didn’t just push a few buttons to “fix” him. Instead she prescribed a six month course of preliminary exercises to make the demands of the work viable and able to be fulfilled.
Getting on a student’s horse is no substitute for good teaching, but in many cases it can be an essential adjunct to it. I should add that with rare exceptions the student should get back on and feel the difference immediately while the instructor talks her through what he has just demonstrated.