Mary Wanless leads a hands-on dressage exercise demonstrating "giving with the hand": how a rider can reorganize contact and break counterbalance with the horse by giving the hand forward quickly. She explains common errors (giving slowly; returning the hand with a pull) and contrasts ineffective attempts with correct quick-release technique illustrated with a partner acting as the horse.
So in this exercise, Millie and I get to join hands with this hand, and we're going to curl our fingers around each other, which I hope you can see. And I'm about to be the horse, she's the rider, and I'm a horse that would like to pull. So here I am, and let's say I've suckered Millie into pulling, and we've got quite a strong contact here. And when we do this, it's kind of like I'm counterbalanced against the rider, the rider's counterbalanced against me. The rider needs the horse, the horse needs the rider to make this counterbalance. And I say to the rider, so how are you going to get out of this? And most riders do a bit of a jiggle and a pull and maybe a lean back and all sorts of things like that. Okay. And it doesn't work. We've still got this counterbalance. Now. I think Millie probably knows what the answer is. So how are you going to get out of this? Okay, she's got it. So what she did was she gave her hand forward quickly, which forced me to take a step and take responsibility for myself because she was no longer holding me up. And in the doing of that, we reorganized the contact. Now, she just did this rather well. There's a couple of mistakes people make. So we're going to set this up again. So mistake number one is giving your hand forward really slowly. So I as the horse can adapt. So do really slowly, give your hand forward slowly. Okay. So that doesn't work. I can adapt to that. And we'll do it. We'll set it up again. So it has to be a really quick give forward. Okay, There you go. Now, mistake number two, which Millie just didn't make, but most people do, is having done the quick give forward, putting your arm back in place quickly with a pull, and then you're back where you started. So what you did very well there was give your hand forward quickly, put your arm back in place without a pull. But nine people out of 10 doing this exercise will put their hand back in place with a pull. So. So there we are, back at square one. And the giveaway didn't earn the rider anything. So we're going to do one more this time. Okay. So see if you can go for real quick. Okay. And there you go without pull.
