So. I’ve started a blog. To be totally honest, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long while but never really knew how to begin, or got busy with other things. Well lo and behold, in the midst of quarantine I’d finally sat down and took the time to figure it all out. It took forever for me to figure out a name for this place, but after thinking about it, consulting my friends, thinking about it some more, re-consulting my friends I finally settled on Inside Leg, Outside Rein.
A common instruction on lessons, “inside leg, to outside rein” is something that I hear in my sleep. The purpose of the instruction is use your inside leg to ask the horse to bend, and the outside rein to temper
how much bend there is. A horse naturally falls in on its inside shoulder, thus, this instruction is also encouraging straigtness, by lifting the shoulder up, and maintaining with the outside rein. Theoretically, the application of pressure from the inside leg should encourage the horse to move away, and ‘fill up’ the outside rein. My coach has always used the banana analogy, in that the horses body should resemble that shape around the turn and wrap around your inside leg. As you become more advanced, one should always have access to all parts of the horses body- both shoulders, and both hind quarters. From there, you can get into renvers and travers and all sorts of fun stuff. But anyways. Its foundation lays in classical dressage which is the where my training comes from, and my coaches training comes from.
I am so grateful to have been brought up in a program with a very strong emphasis in dressage, and a coach who really cares that her students understand the fundamentals of the basics. If dressage is boring to you, you are either doing it wrong or haven’t done it long enough for it to get interesting!! And this is coming from a jumper rider. Inside leg, to outside rein is as much an instruction as it is a mantra to me, and familiar thought I have while riding on my own. Using it for a blog title seemed fitting, because it is comfortable and makes me think of my favourite thing, which is to train! And most importantly, it sounded pretty good. After all, good aesthetics is vital.
I have so many ideas on things to write about, and it’ll be good to flex this creative muscle which I haven’t really had to use consistently since high school! It gets a little more frightening every time I think about how long ago high school was… but we aren’t going to talk about that. I hope to talk about my life with Raffi, equestrian fashion, the odd #NurseLife story, some product reviews, with a whole lot in between! Any who, thanks for stopping in!!
Xo
Sara
Comments