She has Rider Analysis Clinic

She has been looking forward to this for weeks - the nice man that did the computer analysis on my feet returned to analyse Her.  In Her wisdom She decided to do it on Posy since a) Posy was the right size for Her and b) Posy is the more difficult and more in need of help.

It was a windy day and a number of Her chums turned up to watch.  This guaranteed that Posy became thoroughly upset by the whole shebang and completely lost the plot.  Posy would barely venture to the end of the arena and was all over the place and, if truth be told, not completely in control.  She was mortified.  Eventually, enough trotting and cantering had been done to enable Posy to trot up the centre line for the camera.

The white dots show that the saddle is slipping to the right, the pink stripe across her shoulders show that She is dropping her right shoulder.  Otherwise Her position was regarded as generally good, but ineffective since Posy was prancing around with her head in the air.  The rest of the lesson was spent trying to convince Posy that her head should be in a nice outline and not stuck out gawping at everything around her.  

She had always hoped to obtain an outline by riding forward into a passive hand, since it works for me (but then I am super talented and pay attention and try to do the right thing).  She was forced to admit that this method doesn't work well for Posy who spends most of the time thinking of other things.  Russell's method was to hold the hands wide and vibrate the rein until she flexes at the poll and then release and repeat.  Posy wasn't really helping, but this did work better than doing nothing which is what She had been doing before.

She does feel uneasy about using the rein so much but something has to be done, and it was a lot better than draw reins, bungees or unrelenting bit pressure which She refuses to countenance.

Posy tries to charm Russell of Centaur Biomechanics

At the end of it, She felt that She'd got a lot out of it, but was really depressed that She had been unable to show any basic dressage at all on the day.

PS  She tried the vibrating reins idea the next day when Posy was calmer and was horrified to find that Posy just dropped the contact altogether.  This may explain why all the literature tells you not to try fiddling with the reins to place the head.  She quickly decided that calming Posy would be a better strategy than wiggling the reins.