Finding the Perfect Contact Q&A

0:00Hey there, welcome to the Dressage with Amelia podcast where it's all about breaking things down and helping you learn to love your ride. I'm your host Amelia Nukum. These sessions are recordings from my Facebook live where I answer as many questions as I can from my audience. I hope you enjoy this episode where I answer your questions about Dressage. Please help me out and share this with a friend who also rides horses. Hello, hello everyone. Nicole here from Team Amelia. Let me know if in the chat if you can hear me or not and why don't we start off today's call with a win. So wherever you are in the world, please part a win in the chat. My win today is that it was a beautiful day out. I got to sit on both of my horses. The sun was shining. It wasn't raining at the Pacific Northwest, which is always a great start to our day. So with that, I see a

1:00few guys are here. We've got Hyde from Argentina. Sorry, Hyde from Ohio. Jane says that she wrote to this month's podcast today. It was a really good one. Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, people and everyone can hear me fantastic. Thank you so much for that. Okay, wonderful. Well, thanks so much for being here today. Guys, you get me from Nicole from Team Amelia. If we haven't met yet, hi. I'm a licensed competition coach, Andrew Sasha and an FBI writer. Amelia is at a horse show this weekend. So she asked me to fill in and be substitute teacher. So we're going to be talking a little bit of a contact today and answering a few of your questions. So as I'm chatting, if you want to put any questions in the comments below, feel free to do that. So contact versus connection. It's sometimes those words are used a little bit interchangeably and they're very similarly related, but they are very different as well. So when we talk about contact, contact is the the feeling from the bit up the rain to the writer's

2:08hand through their elbow. And ideally, we want that to be steady, elastic, soft. You don't want to have a whole bunch of weight in your hands. You don't want to be crooked with your elbows. You want it to be soft and light. Connection, very similar to contact, the connection is the energy that goes through your horse when your horse is connected from back to front. And that energy creates the shape of roundness in our horse. So if you've ever heard the term like get your horse rounder or your horse needs to have a head down or get your horse on the bit, we're talking about getting the horse to make that shape that postural shape in their body. But that postural shape is not caused by bracing our horse in, but rather getting them to to move their body and manipulate their bodies that they stretch over their back into it. So it's kind of like with a ballerina. You don't band them together and say stand like this.

3:09You teach them through years near the dedicated exercises to stand taller, to stand taller shoulders down, they're ribcage in, right? They're pelvis in the correct position. It's the same thing with our horses. So again, contact is the feeling of the rain, like the feeling in your hands. Connection is that and a cycle of energy from back to front and roundness is the shape of the posture or the frame that your horse creates when they have connection, right? Let's see, I don't have any questions in the chat about that, so hopefully that's good. And I brought my handy-dandy shoelace. If you've been in strides or if you've seen me on one of these calls before, you know that my shoelace gets more air time than I do. So when we talk about contact, right, I talked about how it's the feeling in your hands, right? When we have contact, we can have like a free walk contact, which is loose and it's loopy and things like that. You're standing there on the buckle. You don't really have a feel. This is no contact,

4:12right? If your horse is super heavy and strong and rushing around, you might have a tight contact, which doesn't feel very good, right? Ideally, what we want is we have a soft elastic contact. The horse chooses their mouth. We can feel it. We move our fingers. We can move our wrists and the horse feels it. That is a lot easier said than done, right? And how we get this steady elastic feeling and the soft feeling in our hands starts first because we have to have a slight amount of contact, right? You can't go from no contact to perfect contact, right? What you have to do is if you have rains or long, you have to pick up your rain slightly and I go what's on, I call a soft contact. There's a little bit of space there. And then what I do, we do is we ask our horses to move from our inside leg. We have them to bend and they stretch the outside of their neck and when they stretch the outside of their neck, they make their neck longer and they go and take a glass little bit of that slack. And that's how you get that soft feeling, right? Not from you taking it back, but them taking back it, right? They go to the

5:18bit, right? So when we think of the horse from above, like we're looking at the neck, when the horse bends one way, it's not that the neck actually gets longer, but because the body is bending, the muscles on the opposite side do stretch, right? It's just like if I'm going like this and I stretched my side, I can feel it all in here, right? It's not that my side has actually gotten longer, but I'm stretching it, right? And so it's the same thing that we stretched out. Now, you just have to do that while the horse is moving in your up, up on top posting or cantering or all that sort of things. So that's a whole other ball game, right? Because if you're not horses and static, you're up there moving, they're moving, they're going over jumps, they're going up and down hills, they're going around corners, they're doing transitions, right? So how do we maintain this steady elastic feel with a horse underneath us, right? So the first thing to think about is our seat, right? If our seat isn't supple and moving

6:19with our horse and absorbing the motion of the horse, we'll never have this steady elastic contact. Let me explain. And I'm going to hopefully get on my bed and not die as I fall off. But if I'm riding, my hands are like this, right? And say I have a perfect elastic contact, right? In front of me. But if my seat gets out of whack and I start going like this, or I start going like this, you see how my seat is moving and my hands are moving all around? But notice my elbow isn't moving. My hands are steady in relation to my body, but my body isn't secure. So my hands go all over the place, right? So what we have to learn how to do is that as the horse moves underneath us, we absorb the motion, our hips, whether it's the trot motion, whether it's the canter motion, whether it's the walk motion. And through that, then we can absorb the motion here. We can either stay steady with our elbows or following depending on the gate we're in. And then if all the motion of the horse is absorbed

7:19in our seat, that our hands can be still because the movement doesn't go past, which is what an independent seat is. And when you have a seat that moves with your horse, that's when you can then develop that elastic contact. It doesn't mean you don't, if you don't have a perfect seat, doesn't mean you don't ride with contact. You just have that soft contact. And you acknowledge that, hey, my horse might not be able to get to a certain degree of roundness or develop the certain degree of cold connection yet because my seat isn't strong enough. Hopefully that makes some sense. All right, so I've got some questions because I felt like that was a really good base of knowledge for you guys before I answered a few of their questions that I already had from a previous post. And if you have any questions as we get going, please feel free to put them in the chat below. I always love your questions. Carrie says, what do you do when your horse begins to lift their head with the contact despite you suppling the inside rain and holding the

8:22colino soda can in your outside rain? Great question, Carrie. So I love how you asked it, because I think that in itself is part of the root of the problem, right? Because you're saying, well, I want my steady outside rain with the weight of the soda can, which is totally right. And you're suppling with the inside rain. Well, the fundamental part that you've forgotten about, which is the answer to that, is the leg, right? We create bend using the inside leg pushing to the outside rain to stretch that neck, remember? And so if the horse is completely inverted, no matter if you have a steady outside rain, you're suppling the inside rain. If the horse isn't bending in their body, it's not going to work. It's like doing a stretch. It's like just doing a stretch trying to get my arm across here, right, versus stretching my whole body, right? It doesn't work. So when you feel like it's not steady outside rain suppling inside

9:23rain isn't working, check yourself. Are you sitting correctly? Put your inside leg on and push your horse out on the circle or the line, maybe even a little leg yield feeling, get them moving out to that outside rain. Nick from our team had a great, she was telling you analogy of strips of centrifugal force. Your outside rain should be like containing a centrifugal force, my goodness, tripping over that word today, right? And so you use that, but you have to create the centrifugal force. You have to create the bend and that's what your inside leg is for, right? Yes, Stacy is saying, right, a position sandwich. Yeah, you check your horse, you check you, you check your horse, you check you. Oftentimes if something isn't working with our horse, it's because something isn't wrong with us. I was riding one of my marish today and I was like, I'm really just struggling with the bend here. She's just really doing having difficulty. I just feels like she's really crooked and I thought, maybe I'm crooked. And I looked in the mirror, I was like, no, I think I'm straight. And then I was chit-chatting with one of the other ladies in their

10:26meetings. She gave me this analogy because you have lots of analogies. She goes, oh, I used to think of like a spring, like on top of my head. And I was like, and like pulling up the spring. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And as soon as I thought about that, I sat straighter in the saddle. I didn't realize I wasn't straight, but just that different visual. And my, instantly my horse started to go better underneath me. And I was like, oh, I guess I wasn't as straight as I thought I was. Sometimes if we get interviews, traps of thinking of different analogies, and then we do it still end up getting crooked. And we sometimes see the new analogy or new visual to help realign us or understand a concept. All right. Our next question is from Shantel. She says, what type of bit do you start your young horses with? Do you find the more expensive brands of bits? NSHS worth it. Great question. So Amelia just uses a simple snackle. And I'm the same way. Do more expensive brands of bits. Are they worth it? So that's a great question. A bit will not solve your training problems.

11:30You need to teach your horse how to accept the contact regardless of what is in their mouth. And usually the simplest thing will help. Sometimes certain horses prefer like a softer material, like a rubber bit and things like that. But just generally speaking, just a regular loose ring or egg butt snackle, single joint, maybe even just like a little peanut. I personally, like when I'm starting my own horses and I'm just like teaching them how to wear a bit, I don't really care what it is. I just because it's such a foreign concept and I'm not really even touching the contact yet when I'm just teaching them how to wear a bridal. Because how I do it is I put the bridal, I teach them like how to accept like put the bridal on. And then like I put my rope halter over top and then I do all my work from groundwork with the rope halter over top. So there's no even contact on the bit. And when you kind of have that, it doesn't really you don't need an extensive bit because you're not doing anything with the bit at that point. Once you start to like work with horse a bit a little bit more or even as they start to develop

12:31in their like up the levels, I do find a better fitting bit based on your horse's mouth confirmation can be helpful. Either are some horses that are really tolerant, they don't care what's in their mouth and then you have some horses that are very sensitive. No longer are the days of oh you know you just put one finger on each side and you know the more joints in it, the more severe it is and that sort of thing. We now have more education now and we know that there's a lot of other factors that go into it. The ring size, how high how low it sits in the mouth, the palette size inside the tongue thickness. It's so much of a science now, it's like you need a bridal and bit fitter just like you need a saddle fitter. And so if your horse is struggling with the contact and accepting the bit, first do your groundwork, make sure you know and do it without a bit, do it with your your rope halter or your hack or more and see if you have the same issues, if you have the same issues, it's not a bit issue, it's a training issue. But if you if it's

13:33no issue in the rope halter, it kind of tells you that there might be something some sort of uncomfortableness going on in the mouth. So in that sense it's not so much the brand rather than investing in someone coming out and doing the measurements on your horse and really doing that inventory. And then also there's the rookie mistake where young horses grow. So you know you're going to need to adjust your bridal as they go from three, four, five, six year olds. So great question. Let's see. And then okay, I'm just how do you know if a rubber snapple is what they need when starting out? I find if they're like really gummy in the bit, like if they're really like colby or if they like are completely backed off, like if they you can't get them to go to the contact like when you're doing your groundwork and they're not wanting to like even when you're bending and pushing them away from you, they don't want to take it and they're still sucked back and really tight. That's usually because they're like they're more sensitive in the mouth and then

14:34going with a rubber bit might be something to try at that point. Great question. All right, Amber asks what exercises should I work on for maintaining contact and connection through transitions? I added into the spiral circles and into leg yield, any others. Oh, you added the transition in the spiral in and out and in the leg yield, any others. Oh, great question. So I'm glad you're already doing it in the spiral and the leg yield because essentially what we're doing is we're adding more inside leg to push the outside rein. So in that moment, it's like the perfect, it's like an easier way to time maintaining the connection, right? So that's all you're already ahead when you have that in your brain. The other thing that I think about is if it's a more a little bit more educated horse, maybe a little shoulder four, I also try and think about it,

15:35like the start of a circle, like if I if I'm on the wall and I have to do my transition done alongside like that canter to trot transition and training level, I think about it like I sit up and I start looking like I'm going to take a circle and then I do my transition like that because then it's like the bending aids are still inside leg to outside rein. So it's kind of like a little cheat. It's not like I actually leave the rail, but it's just like a little bit of a simpler way of doing that. And then I'm trying to think of another good one. My go, she was always like yield, like yielding and knowing the transition. You can also do it thinking about other ones. Sometimes you could do a little pirouette feeling like canter to trot if your horse is like already schooled a little bit of turn the haunches feeling in the in the second level work. Basically, because what you're doing is you're collecting so much, you're going them on the hind end and if you feel like you're going to do a little pirouette feeling, right, not actually take a step pirouette, but that kind of feeling of moving the shoulders in. You can time it there.

16:41The other thing you should think about is especially in the canter to trot transitions is timing not just maintaining the connection, but maintaining like the ballads and with the half halt, right? So if you're strong, if you're finding the horse is getting stiff in the downward transitions, it might also be something to do with the timing of when you're applying your like your half-holes. So be conscientious of that. But my fo2 is the leg yield. It is really solid. Like, why would you deviate from it? It's perfect. And remember, you don't have to do a leg yield, you know, from quarter line to a rail. You can do, you know, cut the corner a meter and do it there. Like, you can have leg yield feeling without actually doing a physical leg yield. Great question. And Betsy's asking, how do you keep a steady contact? Yeah, so it is a bit like we have whole courses and lectures on steady contact, right? But the like I said, the biggest thing is your seat first, right? It doesn't matter if your elbows are oscillating or not, or if your elbows are

17:45hinging in the posting track, if you don't have their secure seat. So the better you can get at being straight up and down in an alignment, straight, you know, with your shoulders over top of your hips, over top of your heels, the more you can get in balance from forward to back as well, the better you're going to be at absorbing the motion of the horse, right? Because like I said, if you're out of balance, you're never going to be able to absorb the motion and you're never going to get to say contact. Another example of this, if I am on my horse and I am tipped forward, already I'm like, oh my god, I'm engaging, oh my god, muscles. You guys can't see this, but my toes are like pushed into my bed. But basically, I'm holding my body up, right? Whereas here, my body is stacked on top of each other. This is a lot less effort, right? For me just standing here and when I'm on my horse. So what happens is if I am tipped forward out of position, out of alignment,

18:46and my horse trips, goes faster, takes the turn a little sooner, right? I have to compensate for that somewhere, right? Because my center of gravity is way up here rather than down here. So when it's up here, right, I'm already, I can feel it, I'm like, engaging, right? Naturally, when we get a little out balance, we either grip here or here. And if we grip with our hands, that directly relates down to the contact and no bueno, like our horses do not like that. So the number one thing you can do to develop that steady elastic contact is to get in the correct alignment here and the correct alignment here. So like no leaning this way. Because again, if you lean sideways or you collapse one way, your center of balance is also going up. So you want to try and stack your body parts. If you're in strides and you're doing book club with us and you're reading Sally's book club, she has a great analogy about building blocks. And I was trying to explain to one of my kids that was teaching about the building blocks. And she's

19:50kind of like, she didn't really get it. I was like, do you remember when you're playing Jenga, like the tower game? And it's too much to the side and then it falls. And she's like, yeah, they're like, that's what we don't want. And she's like, oh, I got it now. So don't be a Jenga. You want to stand up straight and tall. And Barb says, tipping for my trainer calls it launch position. Yeah, it really is. It really is. So there's two negative things when you're tipping one way or the other forward or back. You're in less balance and secure and you're more likely to accidentally catch your horse in some way or the other. And so first, like I said, get yourself in position. Then you can start developing the field of the movements and absorbing with your hips and being all loose and letting your pelvis rotate and follow those movements. And then you have to be thinking, okay, the horse's neck also moves in the walking in the canter at the forward and back of the neck, right? So as the neck goes forward and back, if my hands are still, my elbows are locked,

20:50right? As my hair goes forward, my elbows are locked. That hurts the horse, right? Because essentially they're catching the, if you're like, my horse's neck doesn't walk like move in the walk in the canter. It's because you've accidentally trained them that every time they go forward, they get caught. So then they canter like this or they walk like this. And what we have to do to help them then is to over exaggerate our elbows in the walk in the canter until they learn they can stretch out and use their neck again. And so then what happens is then we, we want to be able to follow in the walk in the canter to have that steady elastic feel. Again, easier, so than done. And then in the trot, because we're posting, right, we want to hit, sorry, it's really hard for me to do like keeping one hand steady versus the nut, but essentially want to do is have a little bit of hinge in our elbows. And the great, this is one that my physio does with me. She has the band like, you put it on a door handle. She just has it on a bar on her gym, but essentially do that. You hold on to your bands and you start in a squat position and, oh, hey, let me do it. My best

21:55you guys can see. Like you start in a squat position and then as you rise, you go forward. And then the tension in the band will tell you if you're maintaining the contact or not, right, because as you go up and down, it will get tighter, stronger. Did I do that right? If it's down there and it's tight up here and we go, yes, that's that way. It'll make sense when you go to try it, when it's actually attached to something. But essentially, you want to keep the same contact, the same feel, the same weight in the band, in the elastic band that's you up and down into your squat. And it's also a great way to practice your alignment, because you don't want to be holding the band to keep you up. You want to be engaging your core to go down and up. It's another great one, too. Jans has a great description of posture. Yeah, the Jenga. It is, isn't it? I worked for that kid. Awesome. And then other question, Emma asks, how do I actually ask for roundness on a horse that's super inverted? Do I have to constantly supple with my reins to encourage him to get

22:59keep his head down or do I not ask for anything until his forwardus and suppleness is perfect? Excuse me, really good question Emma. So, it kind of goes back to our first question from Carey, which was how do you get their head down when you have a steady outside rein and supple inside leg into the rein? You have to go back to, it's not about the reins, it's about the bend in the body, the bend from the inside leg to create the banana shape in our horse to be bent. And it's quite hard if the horse has a naturally high set neck, which your horse does, right? Which I believe is a standard bread. So, he's a little bit already kind of up here. So, you have to be thinking about if they're super inverted like that, you have to teach them how to yield in their body first. And if they're not bending just from the leg aids, you have to then open your inside rein, show them where to move their neck. And as you apply the inside leg to show

24:02them, hey, when I apply my inside leg here, it means you have to shape your body like this. And that's what all the groundwork does and teaches them that Amelia works with is, you know, here's how we show our horses how to get in the position. It's like the ballerina, right? We have a verbal way to tell the ballerina how to put your hips, how to duct your tail, how to put your shoulders back. But with the horses, we have to figure out a tactile way to show them how to do that. And so, that's why when we start with just the simple bending, can you just take up the contact before they turn their head? When I was with Amelia, I can't remember where we were at. We were at a show or a clinic or something. And someone had cleaned her bridal, cleaned her bridal, sorry, I'm really tired of it up since 4am. Somebody cleaned her bridal and when they put the reins back on, they twisted the the snaffle on the double. So when it was on her horse, they were twisted. So I picked up the snaffle rain and undid it and then was like, untwisting it and like

25:02taking it. And I literally just picked up the rain and was untwisting it. And all of a sudden, the horse is like, right on me. And I was kind of like, why are you being so nosy? And then I realized it was literally for me picking up the rain. Like I had no weight in it. It was just, he was that softly trained and that responsive and tuned into me. But he was like, yeah, back in bed, easy peasy. Like, what more do you need? How far back? Right? And I was just like, oh man, I guess I better be more gentle when I'm fixing this. But that's how softly we want our horses to be able to respond to that feeling. And so if he's struggling under saddle, when you're suppling and it's not working, it's because he doesn't understand. So then we have to break it down so look, can you just open your rain? Does he follow it? You know, there's the follow the nodes, exercise and strides this month if you guys are in strides, right? Like that's what that is, right? Can you just go where your nose goes? That sort of thing. Great question. And with that, I think that has come to the end of our questions, which is kind of a little bit of surprise. I

26:04thought there'd be more in the chat from some of our live students here. Let me just double check to make sure I haven't missed anything. Oh, I have. Okay, let's get this. I have one question that says, I always get tense before the canter. No matter how I often, my instructor and myself remind me to relax. The horse anticipates and wants to rush. What does really work to have a smooth canter? That can be really hard when like your body a little bit betrays you. And it's a little bit when someone's saying like, breathe, breathe. And you're like, I can't breathe. No, you know, it's like don't be scared or don't be emotional. It's like that's kind of a like you can't really just do that naturally, right? So when I find myself getting tense for something, like I'm anticipating something in my brain, right? Whether it's whatever writing, I trick myself. What I do is I tell myself, okay, I'm going to canter, like say if it's canter, I'm going to canter in that corner. So I'll go, I'll start my horse up. I'll be looking thinking about and I'll say, okay,

27:05I'm going to sit up tall. I'm going to sit the trot. And then I, and as I'm approaching and as soon as things start to like go wrong because I'm getting tense or my horse rushes or whatever, what I do is I say, no, I need to make that perfect before I move on. So before putting me up when I'm sitting, if the horse gets tense and stiff, it's that point of my outside like back to canter. I say, no, put my inside like on bend, soften here. Maybe I go posting, get the quality of the trot back. And I kind of, and I kind of trick my brain because what's happening is something in your body is accidentally giving a warning light to your horse to say this is coming up. And then that's why they're responding. So you have to break that pattern. At least that's what I do is I break that pattern and I trick myself into not route like not doing the canter. Another way you could practice it is like the walk trot walk trot canter exercise. And so I do this a lot with the kids. And I'll be like, we're on the trim your circle. I'll be like trot walk trot walk and I'll like give them instructions

28:08and they'll, okay, okay, I want you to trot there and walk there, right? And they're doing their little, you know, transitions and then I'll be like, okay, the next one canter and they're like, they don't really have time to think of it and they're time to get worried and they don't really know when it's happening. And what I do is because they're pretty smart. They realize that's what I'm doing when I scroll them on it. But what I do is I wait to tell them to do the canter transition until the horse is in a really good place until I can see that they're in a good place. And it usually takes a few repetitions of the exercise until they're just like, okay, we're just doing walk trot transitions. This is easy. This is easy. This is easy. And because they're doing the transitions in the same places, usually the horse anticipates in a good way. Not, hey, oh, we're going up. Oh, okay, we're canter. Okay, cool. And they just pop up into it. So it's kind of hard. You have to have like a way to trick your brain. We were doing video reviews one time and with Susan and Fernando from Stride and they were saying, Susan was saying that she was like, I can't figure out. He just knows when I'm going to ask for trot like half a circle before. I don't

29:11know what's going on. And we were watching the video and I said, well, do you realize that like your hips start moving about half a circle before you want to go in your downward transition? Like, you must be thinking, I need a trot there and your body is changing. And she's like, oh my god, I had no idea. So usually there's something going on with you and what you have to do is find a mental way to change that biomechanic pattern in yourself. But that's a tricky one. I feel for you. And another question, are the shoulder interns from left to right in two ones, supposed to be sharp turns or a bend? And if a bend, could you define how small of a circle on the bend? Oh, great question. Write it as a corner. And so it's going to have bent. Like, you're not, just like how you imagine if the wall was there. Write it like that. So it's going to be like a quarter, quarter 10 meter kind of feeling, right? So and the nice kind of thing about that is the reason why it's set up like that is because you're already should be in the 10 meter bend

30:15from the shoulder in or going into the shoulder in, right? So you want to kind of have that feeling. Like, as you come into your, you're in your shoulder in, you don't change the bend. Do just go off onto your cross. And then as you change, bend going in the new way, that new little quarter sets you up for the new shoulder in. So don't think of it as like a sharp turn. Don't think of it as a like a bending. Just think of it as a regular corner. You would ride if the wall was there instead. Great question. Let's see. I think I did I get all the questions? Oh, someone said your book ending canter exercise made me comfortable. Oh, I'm so glad I love my book ending the canter exercise. And the furthest thing you don't know book ending the canter is when you get this really good quality trot. You go into the short side, you pick up your canter for just like a strider too. You don't worry about the canter. You don't worry about how messy it is.

31:15And then as soon as you feel the canter, you immediately come back to the trot. And you try and get back to that really perfect, balanced, swinging, comfortable trot like as soon as possible. And usually when you're doing it, you know, you, you need a circle or two to get back to that nice good trot or nice good trot again. And then when it gets good again, then you go from a really good quality trot into your few steps of canter and then come back again. And the idea is to make the quality of the trot the same from the beginning to the end. And if you can do that, then usually the canter gets really good. And it's also a good way to like build up your canter and your confidence. I'm glad you enjoyed that exercise. It's one of my favorites. Rebecca says, can you explain the posting trot, what should the writer be doing? Yes, okay, so that's a whole bit other canter words. But essentially, the posting trot is you're rising with the swing of the trot to be more balanced and to be more comfortable. So in the trot, the back goes up and down, right? The horses back goes up and down. So what we are

32:16trying to do is we are trying to match that because if the horses back is going up and down and we're sitting here, we're hitting them, right? So we're trying to go up and down with them, right? And so that it's easier for them to carry out that you add smoother for us to ride, which is why the sitting trot is a more advanced skill. And so with the posting trot, you have to think it's not that you stand in your stirrups and it's not that you grip with your knees and pull yourself up. You have to let the motion of the back push you out of the saddle. That momentum has to be carrying. And it's at first, it does feel you kind of have to like to get into the pattern, you kind of have to feel like you're standing up. But essentially what you want to think about is that you're moving your hips in space. The hips don't just like turn and rotate. But what you want to have happen is like if this is your hip bone and this is your leg, right? And your leg is kind

33:16of like this underneath you. This is another reason why your leg needs to be underneath you. And your body needs to be stacked. Basically what happens is your pelvis goes like this slightly up and down. Sorry, my hands don't move well for this. But essentially it's like because there's a angle here and from your hip bone to your femur and then from your femur to your knee, right? It's like not a spring, but there's there's joints in there that basically you just extend the joints and a lot as the as the horse moves, you just open those joints and then sit back down. And so you have to find that balance. And so sometimes if the horse is behind the leg or too slow, it can be quite difficult to get into the posting track. But essentially we don't want to be gripping or pushing off with our feet in the strokes or anything like that. And then we want to, when we come back down, we want to softly control those joints coming back so we don't slam on our horses back. But again, easier said than done. All right, another question. When I started

34:22asking for more contact and a little bit more frame, my horse has a tendency to tilt his head, mainly when we go to the left, which is on the hollows direction. Oh, what is happening there is that he is struggling with accepting the contact because there's a little bit of frickingness somewhere. Usually it is because we are sitting crooked in some way. Just actually that was literally what was happening to me in my ride today. I was like, I just, my bear was kind of tilting her head and she was kind of like mowling a bit. I'm like, what is running away? And I was like, and it was that I wasn't sitting. And it was funny because I had done that in self analysis. And I was like, I'm sitting straight. Like usually she does this, but I'm not sitting straight. And then my friend gave me that analogy and I did it. And I was like, oh, it got better. She got softer in that contact. So that's what's happening is when they tilt their head, it's an avoidance of the contact because something else is going wrong. Typically it is, and then a straightness alignment issue in ourselves. Sometimes it can be like if the mouth is sore or if there's like something going on in the

35:25bit, but typically speaking is something that's going on with our spine. Really good question. And Jan says, for the spiral in, do the horses shoulders lead going into the smaller circle or the horses hip? Oh, good question. So when I'm spiraling down, typically I steer the horse down. So the hind legs follow the front legs. So there is no like, it's not like one is leading versus the other. I think you probably thought that because like when we spiral out, we try and think about pushing the hip more. The reason why we think pushing the hip more so that they actually get like correctly aligned when they're going out on the spiral out because if we don't then they follow. In less, in less, I am doing a leg yield in, which in that case I let the shoulders come in a little bit first. Or if I'm doing a half pass in, which is right, those are more advanced versions of

36:28just steering my horse in, but the half pass in should be even. I don't want the haunches leading or the shoulders leading. I want it to be even as I come down, maybe even a little shoulders first. But really good question. So spiraling out, we want to think push the haunches out, not so that not so that they lead, but so that we think that they're leading so that our horse stays even, because otherwise they'll be like this. And then spiral it and we just ride down. Great, really good question. And question about the sitting trot. We absorb through the lower lumber with a tilted back, correct? I don't know what you mean by a tilted back. Sometimes some riders when they sit the trot, they have a tendency to sit in and it kind of looks like a you're like you're over rotate a little bit. And sometimes if your horse is if you're in extension, you do get a little bit in your back pocket, but that's not really ideal. The movement of the sitting trot is the same movement as the posting trot. Our pelvis stays should

37:30stay as mostly in a line, but the difference is we're not rising out of the saddle and we're doing it twice as fast because we have to accommodate for both diagonals when we're sitting. We have a whole course on sitting the trot. It is a great skill you have to learn. But then excuse me, the number one rule with learning to sit the trot is quality over quantity. I'd rather you sit for two beats, sit for three beats, then sit all the way around the arena in a not a great balance. So sit a beat or two, then go posting. Once you get your balance back, sit a few beats and then go posting. And maintaining a smooth canter, we step into the inside leg with each rolling motion as we lengthen our canter. Oh, okay, interesting. I think I know what you're asking here. So like if we want to lengthen our canter, how do we apply our legs to do that? I think it's what you're

38:31asking. So I don't think of it as stepping to the inside because if we think about stepping inside, we probably are overweighting one hip or the other. And also we don't want that much weight in our foot, right? So when we are bending or when we're on a canter, we do have slightly more weight in our inside seat bone. But it is like 55%. Like it's like a extra, it's like a drop in the bucket. You should not have any leaning going on in your body. And you shouldn't because the other thing that happens is if I'm, oh my goodness, I'm getting my steps in going up and down off this bed, right? If I step this way, actually, this doesn't really work in my bed because my bed is soft. But if I'm stepping, what it actually does, it actually throws me to the other side when I'm putting, like, I'm pushing weight into my stir-up, whereas if I'm putting weight in my seat bone because the seat is underneath me, it's more accurate. So to answer your question for the

39:34how to lengthen the canter, it is a gentle squeeze in the timing of the canter, right? You have to time it on the motion where the horses can go long. You don't want to be doing it up a down more beat because then they'll just go in the forehand and you don't want to do it when they're in the air. And what you do is because the canter motion is a circle, you want to think about changing your hips so that you make the circle a little bit longer as you gently squeeze at that moment in time and then you take your leg off and then you do it again. So it's not about sideways ness necessarily, like you're not sitting in or sitting out, it's about a gentle squeeze to question if you want them quicker, you do taps with your leg, right? If you want the hind legs to get quicker. Good question. Kyle says, what if he tilts his head during the groundwork, then it's something about your your ring contact, like there's unevenness in your ring. Because that's another great question. And because we don't have an outside leg in groundwork,

40:40some horses do struggle with that because essentially remember with bending, we have to have our inside leg at the girth or outside like a little hind the girth and our outside reign supporting rates. So our outside aids are supporting aids are inside aids are activates in the bending. So if our horse is tilting in the groundwork, it is because there's some unevenness in that element of it at the diagonal aids, but because we have an outside ring, but because we don't have an outside leg, sometimes we are depending on the horse, depending on the movement, depending on the stage of training, we are a little limited in that sense, unless you're exceptionally talented with the long lines. And I will tell you that I know I struggle with that outside leg on the long line because essentially it's just it's like master level long lining, it's like grand pre of long lining if you can get that and like I'd love to be able to do that

41:40one day because that means you can be flying changes and all these other things on the long line and I'm not quite that talented yet. I can do some pretty cool stuff with the long lines, but I haven't quite gotten those flying changes yet on the long lines. It's on my bucket list, so with that, I think we're coming up to the end of our time together for the evening. So with that, thank you so much for being here to meet with H.I. I love chit chatting with you guys. Always so much fun. I always think of new things and new ways to saying things and makes me so enthused about dressage for all and what a great community we have. So with that, have a lovely Thursday evening. Mealia will be back next week, I'm pretty sure, unless I'm misremembering something. And if we are you are in strides, we'll see you there. If you're Thursday's dressage, we'll see you there. And if not, we will see you next week. All right. Bye, everyone. So that's it for this week. Thank you so much for all of your awesome questions, and I hope you learned something new from listening. If you're new to the podcast and you'd like

42:44a question answered on a future one, get on touch on Facebook through Amelia's dressage club, Instagram at Amelia Nukem dressage, or YouTube at Amelia Nukem dressage, and mark the question for the live sessions. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. If you like it, please share it, review it, and tune in again next week. Thanks so much and happy riding.