Peter Atkins; The skinny on the skinny.

Video #4

"You cannot steer to a skinny."  "You do not steer straight you ride them straight."  All things that Lee Ann emphisised to me in my XC lesson.  Great mind think alike!  And definitely something I need repeated to me on a regular basis until I change my long time bad habits of steering.  Steady and I have been spending time galloping in the open field with my had planted at his neck and me steering with my body instead of my hands.  It is such a cool thing and it works.  Unfortunately I too often revert back to steering wheel hands.  And so we keep practicing.  I captioned this video, 'Dorie and Junior get put in timeout'.  It cracks me up when Peter says, "Nope, timeout!"  to Dorie.  Dorie is my friend for whom I was video taping the lesson and you I am sure have seen how awesome her and her very young horse Jr. are at XC.  They are just fun to watch! 


Video #5
"Longer reins and kick them to the jump."  It is so cool to watch a lesson with someone like Peter because you get to immediately see his teaching work.  Another thing that he is adament about it to "never beat a worried horse", and don't punish a horse for your mistakes i.e. looking at the jump, not riding straight, not kicking them to the jump. By beat he means use a whip on them.  I think that is facinating because I have seen many a trainer utilize the whip in situations where horses refuse out of worry and/or rider error.  But I have never seen Peter ever tell someone to whip their horse over a jump.  Along that same line you will hear throughout all of his teaching how important the horse is to him.  He truely cares about the horses and that is a huge factor in my respect for him.

"Do you all feel how effective your eyes are? They look where you look."  This is facinating.  Horse are AMAZING creatures.  To think just the movement of your eye can effect them so greatly, wow! Something he emphisized big time in a later video.

"Kicking the front end where you want them to go.  The back end is going to follow."  "Activating the front end with a soft rein.  They'll keep going and jumping"  GOOD STUFF!




Video #6

Treat a skinny like any other jump.  Your horse only jumps 2'6" width of any jump so it is no different than any other jump if the jump is wider than 2'6".



Video #7

Video #8

Video #9
I appologize in advance about this video.  It is hard to watch because I am running after Peter to keep up and trying to get all the jumps in.  I used the video stabalizing tool on youtube to try to make it a little easier on the eyes.