As I sat down to write this post, I realized that I would once again be running into vocabulary issues, and that I probably need to tackle this sooner rather than later. I do have a horse terminology dictionary which goes from English to Swedish and from Swedish to English, but it doesn’t cover as many dressage terms as I would like and some of them I am a little suspicious of. Some searching around seems to have uncovered what I needed for this post, however.
I was once again put on Sammy. Our regular instructor was ill, but she had left instructions for us to have the same horses if possible, and to continue with the same exercise as last week. This meant preparatory work for shoulder in and some actual shoulder in. We also ended up taking it onto a half pass or, possibly, more of a haunches in. That’s where the terminology became an issue.
Well, the terminology and my riding, too. ;P I had leg issues this week too, but the main problem was getting a grip on Sammy’s outside, especially when it was his left side. At first, he was very laid back, and once I got him going a bit more, he did what he often does when you try to fire him up: he just got more and more fired up. For a while, he had about the right amount of drive, but soon enough he fell over into just running. I guess he may have been feeling his age a bit and didn’t feel up to doing proper work at a trot. The walk was okay, and I think I managed to engage his hindquarters decently at some points. The actual exercises were ... so-so, I’d say. Okay at times, but I couldn’t quite get it together with any consistency.
I also had some issues with my arms and shoulders, which felt rather unusually tired and tense. I am thinking I will need to try to carefully strengthen them a bit, because its pretty rare for me to have problems with them while I am riding. But then again, I am doing a lot more typing lately than before, so I guess I need to add my arms to the body parts that need some fine tuning to improve my riding.