(light music)
- Welcome, I'm here with my buddy Legend.
And today I'm gonna be talking about how
to sit the canter.
We all want to feel like we're secure in the canter,
we've got a good connection with our horse.
So how do we do that?
Today I'm gonna first show you how
to sit the canter correctly,
show you in slow motion a little bit what we're looking for
and how we can move with the horse,
work with the motion and not against it in the canter.
And then I'm gonna be showing you four common mistakes
that we can make when working in the canter
and how to solve them.
So what are the building blocks of a correct canter?
The first step is we want to follow
the motion with our hips.
Next we want to follow the motion with our arms.
We want to make sure that we're stretching up nice and tall.
That our legs are nice and long and our toes are up.
So here I'm following the motion with my hips.
Following the motion with my arms.
I have my toes up, nice long leg,
and I'm sitting nice and deep and relaxed into the saddle.
Now that you've seen the canter done correctly,
and you know the pieces that go into being able
to ride with your horse and be able
to be confident in that canter, following the motion,
let's talk about four challenges
that can arise in your canter and how you can solve them
if you're struggling with them right now.
The first one is bouncing in the canter.
When we're bouncing in the canter,
it's usually happening because we have
too much tension in our bodies.
Often this happens when we're gripping with our legs.
If you're gripping with your legs,
it's usually because your hip flexors
are a bit tight.
Your legs are a bit tight.
So anything that you can do off your horse
to stretch those hip flexors and open 'em up.
Loosen up those legs so you can follow the motion
is gonna help you in your riding.
Number two is driving with the shoulders.
This is happening when we're kind of pushing
the horse along with our upper body
instead of following 'em with our hips.
So what we wanna do instead of driving
with our shoulders is we want to follow
the motion with our hip and our core
and keep our shoulders quiet and over our hips.
Number three is falling forward.
This is happening when we're collapsing our upper body.
And when we collapse our upper body like this
it puts our horse out of balance
and we're less balanced.
So what we wanna do instead of collapsing forward
is stretch up nice and tall in good posture.
If you're struggling with this,
you could do exercises on the ground
to help strengthen your back chain.
So here I'm strengthening my back doing a superman.
And this is a wonderful exercise
to help strengthen your back.
Number four is leaning too far back.
And this is happening when we're falling behind
the motion of the horse.
You can see how my legs are swinging.
I'm bracing in my feet too much.
And that's pushing me back behind the horse.
So I'm in more of a chair seat,
as you can see on the left,
and I want to be in a more of a kneeled position
as you can see on the right.
So how do I achieve this kneel position,
which is a more aerobic balanced frame?
Well, I want to work on strengthening my core
and typically I'm gonna do this off of my horse.
So any exercise you do to strengthen your core.
Here I'm doing bicycles, crunches,
is going to help you to be able
to sit in a better, more aerobic frame
when you ride your horse.
I hope these tips were a help to you.
If you're working on improving your canter right now.
The canter can be a little bit of a challenging gait
if you've gone through a time
where you've taken a break from riding.
Maybe you're, you know, working mostly on your trot work.
But once you get confident into the canter,
it's a gait that's really comfortable to ride
and is really exciting to be able
to have that ability to ride up to the canter
and not feel like you're afraid
or you're gonna lose your balance.
So, I hope this video has inspired you
to go out and practice your canter.
Giving you some more tools to improve it.
And if you did like this video,
you can hit that like button and subscribe.
And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
(light music)