Lesson Ideas....

[Legs11]

I am helping a novice/Nervous friend with her newly purchased Welsh Mare

Have agreed to give her some 'lessons' until she feels brave enough to to venture out and find an instructor of her own.

Mare is very lovely, well school and could almost be described as sharp.

Rider is quite novice and has the basics....but is very very intellectual and needs to know the whys and wheres and analyse everything before doing it.

When being taught to leg up she would not do so until she had been given angles and dimensions/distances at which to hold her hands, place her leg etc....


So - Any ideas on what we can cover to keep it simple and build her confidence but at the same time make it complicated enough to tax her brain...?!

 

[sea_view]

Transitions, basic twenty metre circles - possibly build a 20m square with poles to help her with sizings, figures of 8's and serpentines? Just so she is getting used to speeds, basic bending etc?

 

[charlimouse]

What I always start with when teaching is how to warm the horse up and cool down. I ask the rider if they no any exercises they could do to warm up, then we have a discusion about it, making sure the rider knows why they are doing each exercise, and how it will help the horse. Then I tell thenm to go and put what weve just discussed into practice. This way the rider learns to think for themselves, and it also means that when i'm not around they know what exercises they can use. I tend to do warming up and cooling down in the first session I have with a rider, as I feel it is the basis on which schooling can be built, plus it ensures the rider knows the reason why we warm up and cool down our horses.

From there depending on the level of the rider and what they want to achieve, i'll work on the quality of the pace, ensuring they can recognise themseves when it is right, transitions, and eventually lateral work, ensuring that I approach it it a logical manner, ie start with a turn on the forehand, moving on to leg yield etc.

When I teach i try to make sure that the rider is aware of why we are doing each exercise, how to ride it correctly, how to progress on from that exercise, and get them to a point that they can recognise when the horse is doing the exercise correctly, so I know that they can practice and progress when I am not there.

I have had loads of instructors who have just said do this, do that, but havn't given a reason why, which meant when I was on my own I had very little idea of actually what to do!