Internship in Academic Art of Riding and Straightness Training with Ylvie Fros

-importance of riding aids and developing shoulder-in

First published in April 2013.

Feeding horses and trying to prevent haylage from flying away in a wind! Photo by Rebekah Tauritz

It’s 7.30 am in Lunteren, the Netherlands. I am pushing a wheelbarrow of haylage towards the paddock paradise, where dozen of horses are anxiously waiting for me while whinnying their morning greetings. It’s cold and frosty, spring is late this year. But sun is trying to push its way up on the sky. My fingers are cold but I don’t mind. It’s nice to be out in the fresh air with the sound of birds and horses.

After feeding, the duties of interns include mucking out the paddock paradise and stables. Between the tasks there is time to watch Ylvie train her horses and watch lessons she gives to visiting students. Of course as an intern you are also entitled to several lessons per week yourself and the lessons with Ylvie were one of the main reasons why I decided to go for an internship. However, I also wanted to experience a small glimpse of daily routines of running a yard, and feel how it is waking up with sounds of horses every morning!

At the start of my internship Ylvie and I discussed some training issues that I wanted to focus on. A few notable training goals emerged immediately, including a very important exercise called shoulder-in (SI). Riding SI correctly will ask the horse to take more weight on its inside hind leg, which will set the outside shoulder more free. Therefore, SI will strengthen the horse’s hindquarters and releases weight from the more fragile front legs. So, it is not for nothing that Nuno Oliveira named SI the aspirin for horses!

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Excersise shoulder-in teaches horse to take weight on inside hind leg and sets the out side shoulder free.

To teach horse SI or any other exercise it is essential that horse understands the riders aids, and horse is not left guessing what the rider means. So we also practised my communication with Zamour and this we did first in standing. By changing my seat from left to right, and with a help of the cavasson, I could ask Zamour to follow the movement, thus explaining her that the shift in my weight means change in right and left bending. Furthermore, I practised moving my weight from forwards (lighter seat) to slightly backwards (collected seat), asking Zamour to follow this. We even trained the aids of SI and quarters in (QI) while standing. This I did by moving the weight around the shoulders of Zamour by a touch of a rein on a neck and combining it with my seat and legs. A good pointer from Ylvie, regarding the SI aid, was that the aid asking for the shoulder to move in is not a pulling move. It is a pushing move! So the rider must push the shoulder in with the outside rein while supporting the horse with an inside leg. All in all, I found the standing exercises very useful, although, tedious at the same time! They really forced me to think what I wanted and how I could best explain my aids to Zamour.

In riding we put the aids in action, while practising the side movements. By asking a little bit of SI and a little bit of QI my aim was to align Zamour’s shoulders with the hips and create a straight, light and balanced horse. “In your stage of training, it is not always about riding a perfect SI or QI. It’s about getting a reaction to your aids and to get Zamour to stays light between the reins. “stresses Ylvie! “If you get that its good”. Further Ylvie outlined following 4 steps that I should follow in my training. And if I get stuck in one of them, I must go back to step 1 and build again from there:

1. make sure you have the right swinging of the horses back
2. check moveability of the shoulders
3. see if you can get the frame of the horse little higher towards forward-forward or even forward-up
4. check if you can increase the rhythm and shorten the step to get collection

Then slowly with time I can try to move the borders and extensiveness of the excersises but it is important not to move on to the next exercise/step if I feel that Zamour is getting heavier. After all “exercise is only an exercise if it improves the movement of the horse” as Bent usually puts it :)

So Zamour and I had a great trip to Lunteren and a very educational internship! Now we just need to get on with the homework and see how our training develops!

Below also a short video impression of my stay with Ylvie. I hope you enjoy it!

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