Learning to ride as an adult E-Book

Erika Prockl

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 139

Beschreibung

Learning to ride as an adult

Leseprobe

Erika Prockl

Learning to ride asanadult

A New Training Method for First-Time

The author or publisher cannot be held responsible for the information (formulas, recipes, techniques, etc.) contained in the text, even though the utmost care has been taken in the writing of this work. In the case of specific - often unique - problems of each particular reader, it is advisable to consult a qualified person to obtain the most complete, accurate and up-to-date information possible. EDITORIAL DE VECCHI, S. A. U.

Translated by Kostanze Allsopp

Typesetting and design: Ravenstein, Verden

Illustrations: Gabriele Wagner

Photographs: Josef Puchinger

© Editorial De Vecchi, S. A. 2021

© [2021] Confidential Concepts International Ltd., Ireland

Subsidiary company of Confidential Concepts Inc, USA

ISBN: 978-1-64699-973-6

The current Penal Code provides: “Anyone who, for profit and to the detriment of a third party, reproduces, plagiarizes, distributes or publicly communicates, in whole or in part, a literary, artistic or scientific work, or its transformation, interpretation or artistic performance fixed in any medium or communicated by any means, without the authorization of the holders of the corresponding intellectual property rights or their assigns, shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of six months to two years or a fine of six to twenty-four months. The same penalty shall be imposed on anyone who intentionally imports, exports or stores copies of such works or productions or performances without the said authorization. (Article 270)

Contents

Introduction

1. Battling with the urge to cling on

2. Upright is out, relaxed is in

3. About the spine

4. Wrong on every chair

5. Different people tense up differently

6. The slipped thoracic girdle

7. The secret of light hands

8. Emergency schooling aids

9. How does a horse move?

10. Swinging hips – let’s move!

11. Something’s happening down below

12. Light seat bones and muscles

13. “If it weren’t a luxury...”

14. Control

15. “Halt” without the reins

16. The everyday and the rider’s turn

17. Good extension is the way to bending

18. When the circle changes to an ellipse

19. A final step – the canter

20. Freedom of the back – the forward seat – jumping

To round things off

Further reading

Many thanks

Introduction

I was already almost twenty-five years old when I decided I wanted to learn to ride. As I was relatively athletic, I did not think that my age would be a problem – how wrong I was! To begin with, the not uncommon riding school practice of screaming instructors unnerved me quite badly, and I found to my disappointment that I was making no progress at all. I never really felt “at home” on a horse and came very close to giving up riding altogether.

The majority of riders learn to ride as children or during adolescence, and therefore have never encountered the glass wall of insecurity and fear which can encircle the adult riding student and which turns a normal person into an awkward clumsy fool, unable to hear instructions. Accordingly, most riders have little understanding of the adult novice’s problems.

I, on the other hand, can well remember how helpless and unsupported I felt.

Fluid, confident riding can only be achieved through practice. But more than that, the adult learner must first unlearn habits of bad posture and gain an insight into balance and coordination of the body. Only after learning not to fight a constant battle against one’s own clumsy body, can the rider learn to understand and work with the horse.

This book is intended to offer you the opportunity to practice riding movements in your own time and in familiar surroundings, without stress or hindrance. These movements can then be joined together into more complex coordinated movements and finally be put into practice on the horse.

Erika Prockl

Erika Prockl

1. Battling with the urge to cling on

Anybody who wants to learn to ride as an adult will have to be prepared to do battle with failure. Even from those very first hours on a horse, when any notion of a feeling of unity with the horse will seem eons away, when the motion, strongly reminiscent of an earthquake, tips the beginner off-balance, every part of the body tenses up and, to increase the misery, the riding instructor keeps on insisting that the rider should loosen up and start relaxing.

Of course, the rider would gladly comply, but his/her body isn’t cooperating. As soon as the rider sits in the saddle and everything below him begins to move violently, the rider becomes a clinging monkey – an uninspiring occurrence.

The muscle groups on the inside of the upper thigh, the upper and lower leg, the knees, the buttocks and, of course, the hands, close in reflex – everything is needed to hold on and stay on.

This is an involuntary act as well as an unwanted one, because it is impossible to simply switch off reflexes and the instinct to survive.

At the walk, our beginner is able to follow the instructions of the riding teacher up to a point. At the trot and canter, everything simply falls apart. In order to keep his students, the riding instructor will remain polite, but it is easy to see that his enthusiasm for this kind of student is limited.

Other riders seem to be floating effortlessly on their horses. Children and adolescents provocatively demonstrate how simple and enjoyable riding can be. Are these people all naturally talented?

They are not, and our beginner is not as untalented as it seems at first glance. Adult learners, however, no longer have all the prerequisites that are imperative for riding:

•a highly developed sense of balance.

•good body control, including of muscles and joints that are rarely used from day to day, as well as the ability to have equal agility on both sides of the body.

•nonchalance or courage, whatever one may call it.

•love and understanding of animals, combined with a practically unlimited trust in one’s partner, the horse.

When you have had the opportunity of learning to ride at a very young age, you will find it difficult to imagine the problems which novice adult riders face.

Children who are physically active are ideal riding students. They still have all the prerequisites and can learn complicated movement sequences in play by means of imitation. Due to the fact that they imitate quite uncritically, it can, however, happen that they imitate every bit of nonsense. Therefore, children always only ride as well as they are taught.“Couch potatoes,” who spend their leisure time without much physical activity, watching television and playing on computers, are noticeably clumsy and, as a result, fearful.

In the case of adolescents, unfortunately, physical fitness is no longer a foregone conclusion. A residue of the natural childhood ability to balance will remain, and this ensures that the inhibiting factor of fear can more easily be overcome. Lack of physical movement and the habit of spending leisure time in unhealthy ways, however, have already left their mark. Often, their general daily posture is completely wrong, namely drooping and sluggish. Thus, it is very difficult to impart corrections of the seat and posture.

An adult has forgotten to a large degree the art of balancing his body. His control of his body is also built upon well-known movement sequences, carried out repeatedly. During childhood we are able to learn new types of movement by means of imitation. From the onset of puberty, we lose this ability and have to combine new movements with movement patterns already memorized by our brains. If you have had an active childhood, you will be able to select from a large number of types of movement. If, on the other hand, your childhood was spent just sitting around, any type of sports activity will be fairly difficult to learn.

It is essential that an adult should be taught in a completely different way to children or adolescents. As he is unable to learn in play, i.e., via imitation, he needs to be able to think through every course of a movement in peace, in order to be able to consciously memorize every detail. He needs explanations, many exercises which he can carry out at his own pace, and sufficient time to combine the different movement sequences.

An excellent instruction aid to correct the seat is lungeing lessons. Unfortunately they are often given by helpful but unqualified aides, and in some cases this form of riding lesson actually does more harm than good.

It was l’Hotte, the French “Riding Pope,” who quite rightly said: “In the art of equitation, knowing a great amount is just the beginning to acquire a good elemental knowledge.”

So far, riding has not become a popular mass sport, but even so, you should not expect the undivided attention of a good riding instructor – at least not if you are only paying the average price for a riding lesson.

If you want to achieve something in this sport, despite the odds against it, there is only one approach: the do-it-yourself method. Read books on equitation, observe good riders, and first and foremost get your own body back in shape.

If adolescents between the age of 14 and 19 are asked to stand on only one leg, 56 percent prefer the left leg. If the leg they are standing on is changed, around 50 percent of 14-year-olds felt slightly insecure. In the case of 19-year-olds, 75 percent already show a preference for their favorite leg.

This means that the ability to keep one’s balance diminishes fairly rapidly with age, whereas the one-sidedness increases in equal measure.

As a right- or left-handed person, you are aware that you are distinctly more dextrous with one hand than with the other. However, do you also know which is your more skilled leg and which is the clumsy one?

The secret of perfect riding lies in having completely relaxed buttocks. Relaxed buttocks, however, will only come when you have a good sense of balance. We now have to attempt to shrink the area of support you require through daily exercises. This will reawaken your dormant sense of balance and will, at the same time, exercise your body control and equalize dexterity of both sides.

Horses are immediately able to recognize the expertise of their rider.

Exercise 1:

Improvement of Balance and Equal Dexterity of Both Sides

Imitate a stork during numerous possible activities and use only one leg as support. This makes your position unstable and your sense of balance will be mobilized. Your morning activitiesin the bathroom are as good a startas any.

Change legs. You will soon find out that you have a favourite leg to stand on. When you first sit on a horse, the different parts of your body will initially also behave with very different levels of dexterity, and it will take a lot of work to balance this as much as you can.

Walk on pavement curbs as you used to do as a child; use everything that imitates a gymnastics bar as a training aid. Maybe you can even secretly visit a children’s playground when taking the dog for its evening walk – there are many opportunities to reawaken your sense of balance!

When we sit down, we generally choose as comfortable and stable a seat as possible. This changes with a horse. However inviting a saddle may look, it is only suited for comfortable relaxation if it is used as a bar stool. On a horse, we balance with our buttocks on a part of the arched back of the horse – if our horse is going forward correctly. This means that we only have a very small support area, which, to make things even more difficult, is moving violently. Therefore, it is important to become reaccustomed to sitting in motion.

Go out and buy a physiotherapy ball (often called a space hopper). This is a slightly larger version of a gymnastics ball.

You can buy these inflatable balls in several sizes in most specialist orthopaedic shops. Normally a ball with a diameter of 75 cm is the ideal size. If you are very tall, choose the 85 cm size, and if you are short, go for 65 cm.

Such a ball will cost no more than the equivalent of a couple of riding lessons, and you will soon realize that this is a really sound investment.

Exercise 2: Motion while sitting.

Exercise 2:

Sitting in Motion

Take every chance you can to sit on your physio-ball. It is impossible to sit completely still, without any action at all, as you have to find your balance anew all the time. Don’t hunch up your back, sit upright. The ball almost gives you the feeling of sitting on a living being, and you should increase this feeling by continuously bouncing the ball up and down.

Not only is this an excellent preparation for riding, it also acts as a pronounced relief for tensed-up back muscles.

To begin with, it is possible that you will find sitting in motion quite strenuous. In this case, simply change to solid seating and back to sitting in motion. Allocate your ball a place next to your sofa. After a long and stressful day at work, sitting in front of the television all evening is possibly not the ideal way to relax the body.Instead, you should switch to the ball at intervals.

Even Granddad now likes to sit in motion.

You will soon experience progress on horseback, because you will be less tensed up. The urge to cling on, however, may accompany you for the rest of your riding years. Sad but true.

The more experienced you become, the more you will be able to confront stressful situations, and the less forceful the urge will become and the less often it will strike. Even the best rider will from time to time experience the urge to tense up and cling to their horse!

The rider is continually displaced. It requires a good sense of balance to be able to correct one’s seat immediately. The ball is an excellent instrument to use for training one’s sense of balance.

2. Upright is out, relaxed is in

Now we shall come to a typical problem of civilization. We sit for too long and in most cases adopt a poor position as well. Walking is healthy; relaxed standing can just about be justified. Sitting ceaselessly, however, leads to a weak posture, in other words, overstretching and slackening of the muscular system. Sitting is particularly unhealthy if it is carried out:

•over long periods.

•immobile.

•in extreme positions.

Our spine has a natural S-shaped curvature. This shape gives the back stability and flexibility, and should be retained at all times. If we twist our spine for a short period, this will create a significant increase inpressure on our intervertebral discs, the buffer zones between the vertebrae, but a healthy spine is perfectly able to endure some short-term overstrain. If we sit in a tensed up incorrect posture for hours, this will have long-term negative effects.

Many years ago, only two types of sitting positions were known: the working posture and the listening posture. The working posture is a continuous slightly forward hunched position. From very early youth onward – due to the fact that we encounter level tables and desks almost everywhere – we have to work for hours in this posture, although this can wear out our discs significantly.

The listening posture is an upright type of sitting down, during which a supporting backrest is intended to relieve the strain put on our spine. Unfortunately, it is rarely possible to take up this healthier posture in a normal working day.

In the past, children and adolescents were always admonished to sit straight: “Sit straight – hold your head up” was the usual rule. Nowadays, this admonishment is basically treated as a joke, and this has encouraged an unhealthy modern variant of the sitting posture: slack and languid.

In this relaxed type of sitting position, the back is rounded in such an extreme way that the natural bend of the spine disappears completely. This imposes great pressure on each disc.

When hacking out, the rider should sit upright in a flexible position. A slumped weak position puts avoidable stress on the forelegs of the horse and is damaging for the rider’s spine.

Anybody sitting in a hunched up position ...

... will do the same on horseback.