Using the Outside Rein
amywink September 18th, 2009
I’ve been working on understanding Andy Marcoux’s article “The Outside Rein Demystified” (Driving Digest July/August 2008) since, oh, about July/ August 2008. Actually, I’ve taken to reading it again and again to see how much my conceptual understanding of driving has developed.
Last summer, I could understand about a third of it and the rest just made my head hurt. At the point where my understanding ended, I always felt like I’d just jumped off into the deep end of the pool without my waterwings. So, I’d shut the magazine and try again further down the road. Jerry O’Carroll and I actually discussed this article a great deal during my lessons last spring and by midspring, he was encouraging me to think about my turns as Andy had written about them (pg 17). So I went back to the article and read more, getting a little bit further, until I thought “Deep End! Deep END!” somewhere in the section called “How I Use the Outside Rein (Most of the Time) right around “please turn to page 31″.
Flounder, Flounder….
But I keep carrying this article around, every time I have time to spend sitting–waiting for my students to complete their essays or exams, waiting in doctor’s offices. Last week, I’d read further and understood further but had to leave the pool at the end of “Come Fly Away”.
Today, I had some time to sit and wait for my mother’s MRI (she’s fine, btw), and I got to the last section “Resisting Weight in Balance” and I found out I could finally swim in the deep end of the pool. Maybe not perfectly, but it was swimming and I was afloat! I read and re-read the section today, finally understanding what was happening with the outside rein and the turn:
“As you drive your horse, your outside rein acts as sustaining pressure. The horse counters that pressure by pulling it forward. If, at the same time, there is intermittent pressure on the inside rein for the horse to yield to, the result is a turn, and a bend away from the steady outside rein. That smacks right in the face of our mechanical instincts which tell us ‘pull left, turn left,’ so it can be difficult to convince our body to follow those instructions. Our challenge is to overcome those instincts and begin to communicate with our horses in a way that augments their balance.” (page 31)
Tomorrow, I’ll see if I can apply what I understood today!!
