Anyone who read my article in the April 2000 edition of this magazine, about my lunge lesson with Minette Rice-Edwards, will know that at the end of my session we identified a problem I have with circles and turns on the left rein. It is unclear why I have developed this problem now; it may just be a function of age, but one possibility is that it has always been there but in recent months I have been riding either youngish horses, or horses who are very weight sensitive, and this has highlighted something which was less obvious when riding more experienced and/or less sensitive horses. It is a typical problem of the right-handed person whose right side of the body is probably stronger than the left, and who tends to favour that side as a result. This, in turn, results in misuse, thus compounding the problem.

Recently I went back to Minette for a follow up lesson off the lunge and her choice of theme, turns and circles, was particularly appropriate in view of the above. We all 'do' turns and circles as part of our warm up routine, but they are so fundamental to both horse and rider that they deserve greater attention than they sometimes get as we hurry on to execute more exciting and more 'difficult' steps. I have put 'difficult' in inverted commas because in fact there are few things more difficult to achieve than perfectly shaped circles, whether of 20m, 15m or 10m and whether at walk, trot or canter. All require both horse and rider to be balanced and straight, with the complication that 'straight' on a circle in fact requires a continuous curve in the horse's body which is mirrored in the rider's position. If the rider is not balanced and in alignment the horse will fall out at the shoulder or the quarters, lose balance and rhythm, and in some cases (see below!) execute not a circle at all, but a shape unknown to geometry.

As before I rode Aladdin. Minette had marked out a 20m circle at one end of the school with cones and we started by walking the circle, keeping as close as possible to the cones. Minette asked me to quit and cross my stirrups and I was encouraged to release any excessive tension and stiffness by raising and lowering my shoulders and swinging my legs gently backwards and forwards from the hip without lifting my seat bones from the saddle. Freedom and alignment of the head, neck and shoulder are essential for a free lower back and correct seat, and these are very important for the turns.

This exercise, like all that followed, was repeated on both reins, and even at that early stage I found that Aladdin's sensitivity to any shift in my weight or position was such that I had to concentrate hard to maintain my contact with the cones. On the right rein I had few problems. On the left, however, I found that my tendency to twist my upper body to the left in an attempt to maintain the left turn was in fact having just the opposite effect - Aladdin was starting to fall out through the shoulder away from the pressure of my inside seat bone. In the past I have tried to correct this problem by bringing my left side forwards, and have met with limited success. Minette kept exhorting me to take my right shoulder back, to drop my weight into my right elbow, and to 'fix' my right elbow to my right seat bone. Suddenly, by thinking about my right side instead of my left, I became 'straight', by which I mean in alignment with Aladdin's shoulders. I will clearly have to continue to work at this but the solution to the problem seems to have been found.

Christine used the cones to make her circles more accurate

We executed the 20m circles in walk and then in rising trot. I then repeated the same exercise in walk and sitting trot. In the latter I found that Aladdin had a tendency to throw me out to the right on the left rein; coupled with my own tendency to favour my right side this meant that I needed to move my entire body to the left on the saddle in order to remain centred.

We then moved on to the next stage. As well as cones to mark the outside of the circle Minette had very helpfully placed four cones to mark 'x'. I was asked to perform 10m circles by passing through 'x' on left and right reins, in walk and then in sitting trot. At first I was apprehensive about the left rein; the smaller the circle the less margin for error, and I now had to turn in from the circle that Aladdin and I had been following and to which we had both become accustomed.

Minette went through the aids: position the lower outside leg behind the girth, allowing the outside seat bone down and forward to turn the horse, keep the forward movement with the inside leg, control the speed and the degree of the bend with the outside rein and use the inside rein to correct the flexion of the head and neck if necessary. I was allowed to make the 10m circle from whichever point on the 20m circle I wanted, and more than once I opted out because I knew my weight was not correctly balanced.

Continues........

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