The usual daily stress of modern living means adults, and very often even adolescents, adopt tensed-up and faulty postures, which have a particularly negative effect on the horse. Here is a modern riding manual with a completely new training concept specifically designed to counteract the problem:
* A perfect loosening-up programme, with relaxes and eases.
* Complex rider’s movements are separated into individual movements for ease of practice.
* These swinging circles can be practised in day-to-day situations as well on the physio-ball – the substitute horse.
Erika Prockl is a teacher in further education and a certified riding instructor. Not having learned to ride as a child but as an adult, she has personally experienced the suffering of the adult novice rider, and learned from it. This “swinging“ training programme was developed in co-operation with Eva Sogl, a well-known high-level dressage instructor, and has been applied successfully for several years.
This book should be required reading for every riding instructor and adult novice rider.
- 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