Joni Bentley in Taunton on Friday

[Sarah]

hello!

Joni Bentley (Alexander Technique riding teacher) is giving a lecture at the Brewhouse Theatre tomorrow night in Taunton. I'm not sure what her teaching is like, but I thougth it may be an interesting talk to go to. Tickets cost £10 on teh door and it starts at 7pm.

Hopefully some others from NR will be able to make it.

bye!

[Sarah]

hello!

I went to this lecture so here is my report on it.

I think a lot of what Joni had to say was good stuff - the saddle has to fit the horse, the rider must sit straight so the horse can be straight etc etc but there was a lot that left me confused.

Her equivalent of the equisimulator was to use waht she called equibeands - what you and I would call 2m long strips of rubbery material. You tie this band on to one stirup, run it behind the cantle of your saddle and then onto the other stirrup so that both stirrups are held about 2-3" above where they would normally be. You then get on teh saddle (on a saddle horse) and push your feet into the stirrups to stretch the band. This is meant to tretch down the back of your legs. Fair enough.

The problem that I saw was that doing this put the 'rider' into either a chair seat or inot a straight legged version of a chair seat so that they were rocked back onto their tailbone and not onto the seatbones. To over come this, you then had to sit on another rubbery band and hold the ends of it to try to pull yourself onto your seatbones.

I can understand wanting to stretch your legs down, but thought that all you were going to learn from this was to push your feet forward. Anyway, the talk then moved on to rising trot.

What i have understood from Heather (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that you let the horse move you FORWARD in 'rising' trot. Joni had people tipping forward (putting their hands on the saddle horse's 'neck' then lifting their bottom straight up byt pulling on the rubber band! It looked very odd. What also worried me was that to pull yourlef up with your hands you are movign your hands forward so in theory shouldn't pull on teh reins, but you would get used to havign a lot of resitance in your hand when rising so would this then be transferred through the rein to teh horse's mouth once you got rid of the bands?

Joni said her risign trot method looked odd on a saddle horse, but then showed a vid of her workign pupil doing it on a real horse (no rubber bands) saying 'look, it looks really good on the horse'. What i saw, IMHO, was a rider doing far too much work, rising vertically as opposed to going forward, then thrusting the pelvis forward and a horse going overbent.

We then saw the rest of the video and yes, some of the horses did improve their way of going, but it amused me that one of the riders was constantly on the wrong diagonal and Joni was going on about how the rider was helping to balance her horse!

Anyway, the views above are my only personal opinion. I just thought I'd let you all know how I thought the lecture went.

bye!

[HairyCob]

Sarah,

Thanks for your 'report'! I didn't see your original post, or I probably would have come!:(

It sounds like it was an interesting evening, if only in terms of confirming that Heather has the edge!;) Certainly sounds to me like Joni wasn't getting it very right at all in trot from your description- not that I'm an expert of course!:o

Anyway, your report was very useful- I won't be rushing off to get into one of these demos if there is another one locally- so thanks for saving me a tenner!:D :D ;)

C