Nice day yesterday so we took Filly to the outdoor school for a quick online session. The aim of the day was to get her confident an obedient in the new environment. As usual I started with picking out her feet from the chair, but this is just to put a purpose to placing the feet. I still find it difficult to express how important it is to be able to place the feet with relaxation and confidence (of the horse that is, try doing it from a chair and you will find relaxation and confidence in yourself is rather difficult !). The previous day Ritchie had trouble placing Bonitaos front left foot. It was interesting that doing indirect/direct rein online he had trouble stepping the front left foot across. This exercise really does translate into ground and ridden work in a most powerful way and must not be skipped.
From feet we moved onto circling game to allow her to move her feet and get confident in the outdoor school.
We had a few difficult moments, she nearly pulled me out of the chair a couple of times and threw in a few very impressive bucks, but she soon settled as I just maintained consistency in asking for the circle. "Passive persistence in the proper position" springs to mind. In this case I was persistent in asking for the circle, passively, without getting frustrated or angry, but by just asking for the circle using the proper aids and relaxing into neutral as soon as she complied.
After around 10 minutes she settled into nice confident circling with very little input from me. We continued until we got two circles with confidence and relaxation at walk trot and canter in both directions. Next we must work on consistent forwardness, especially as walk.
To break the above lesson up a little, and to give changes of direction on the circle a little more interest I also had a couple of cones out in front of me to do figure 8 around. As usual this was very easy, but I would like to be able to maintain trot through the whole pattern in the future. The snag is that when she is trotting it all happens much faster and keeping up with stick, string and rope handling whilst sat down is tricky to say the least. She tends to breaks gait while I sort myself out. Just as well really !
From feet we moved onto circling game to allow her to move her feet and get confident in the outdoor school.
We had a few difficult moments, she nearly pulled me out of the chair a couple of times and threw in a few very impressive bucks, but she soon settled as I just maintained consistency in asking for the circle. "Passive persistence in the proper position" springs to mind. In this case I was persistent in asking for the circle, passively, without getting frustrated or angry, but by just asking for the circle using the proper aids and relaxing into neutral as soon as she complied.
After around 10 minutes she settled into nice confident circling with very little input from me. We continued until we got two circles with confidence and relaxation at walk trot and canter in both directions. Next we must work on consistent forwardness, especially as walk.
To break the above lesson up a little, and to give changes of direction on the circle a little more interest I also had a couple of cones out in front of me to do figure 8 around. As usual this was very easy, but I would like to be able to maintain trot through the whole pattern in the future. The snag is that when she is trotting it all happens much faster and keeping up with stick, string and rope handling whilst sat down is tricky to say the least. She tends to breaks gait while I sort myself out. Just as well really !
No comments:
Post a Comment