The last two days I have concentrated on playing on line rather than riding. The riding had highlighted the fact that Filly was not upholding her responsibilities of
Acting like a partner was actually not bad so needed little tweaking.
Maintain gait
Maintain direction
Look where you are going.
Maintain gait was ok ish. But I found that I did have to regularly remind her to keep trotting at all when trotting, and remind her to maintain a forward walk when walking. This means that I am having to use my leg more than I would like and risk getting her dead to the leg if I carried on. This was thus better fixed on the ground.
Maintain direction was sort of all right, especially once I had got her thinking forwards, but with all the head tossing at trot thinking forwards was not what she was doing.
Look where you are going was frankly awful. She even tried to trot straight into a fence and I had to turn her at the last second. Going over poles was sort of ok, but we did knock the jump wing over once. Again it was an issue caused by the head tossing. With her head moving that fast there was no chance that she could focus properly and see objects in the way.
This was all getting better when riding, but I felt I could make faster progress on the ground with the circling game. After all this is a game designed to teach the horse its' responsibilities so why not use it ?
We played in the indoor school, the weather being pretty bad outside. I set up poles around a circle so that when she was around 12 feet from me she would cross the middle of the pole. Then we started to circle. To start with she hit the poles almost everytime with her feet and was getting mighty upset about it. At one point she got so annoyed she bolted into canter, but I kept her on the circle. At canter she did not hit a single pole, interesting.
Back to trot. She then started to avoid the pole at trot by ducking to the inside of the circle or pulling out to go around the poles. I guess many people would have been annoyed by this, but for me it was progress. She was now seeing the pole and making a decision to avoid it. I let her do this for a while, but of course it was sort of breaking the maintain direction responsibility. Once I was sure she was seeing the poles I then asked her more firmly to maintain direction and actually cross them. The hitting of the poles became less frequent. To start I would reward her with a rest if she managed to cross a single pole without touching it, then a reward for crossing 2 poles and so on. Eventually we were getting all three poles crossed with maybe a light brush.
The second day was a repeat of day one except that I raised the poles with jump wings on their outer ends only by around 4 inches. Not much but it gave her a more painful consequence if she did not concentrate on her feet and hit them.
Of course I worked on other stuff each session as well, such as the ever popular hind quarter porcupine, but the essence of the session was her responsibilities on the circle. I think we made progress and I will do something similar on my next prepare to ride.
What I like about the Parelli system is that it always gives you clues as to what needs fixing if you hit an obstruction in your progress, and there is no disgrace in going back to previous sections to fix the problem. This I think differs from other systems. I am sure that many would have just plugged on with the riding to fix the problem, but that would have risked making the riding aids dull as I would have had to nag her to get through the issue.
In the long run going backwards is sometimes the fastest way to make progress
Acting like a partner was actually not bad so needed little tweaking.
Maintain gait
Maintain direction
Look where you are going.
Maintain gait was ok ish. But I found that I did have to regularly remind her to keep trotting at all when trotting, and remind her to maintain a forward walk when walking. This means that I am having to use my leg more than I would like and risk getting her dead to the leg if I carried on. This was thus better fixed on the ground.
Maintain direction was sort of all right, especially once I had got her thinking forwards, but with all the head tossing at trot thinking forwards was not what she was doing.
Look where you are going was frankly awful. She even tried to trot straight into a fence and I had to turn her at the last second. Going over poles was sort of ok, but we did knock the jump wing over once. Again it was an issue caused by the head tossing. With her head moving that fast there was no chance that she could focus properly and see objects in the way.
This was all getting better when riding, but I felt I could make faster progress on the ground with the circling game. After all this is a game designed to teach the horse its' responsibilities so why not use it ?
We played in the indoor school, the weather being pretty bad outside. I set up poles around a circle so that when she was around 12 feet from me she would cross the middle of the pole. Then we started to circle. To start with she hit the poles almost everytime with her feet and was getting mighty upset about it. At one point she got so annoyed she bolted into canter, but I kept her on the circle. At canter she did not hit a single pole, interesting.
Back to trot. She then started to avoid the pole at trot by ducking to the inside of the circle or pulling out to go around the poles. I guess many people would have been annoyed by this, but for me it was progress. She was now seeing the pole and making a decision to avoid it. I let her do this for a while, but of course it was sort of breaking the maintain direction responsibility. Once I was sure she was seeing the poles I then asked her more firmly to maintain direction and actually cross them. The hitting of the poles became less frequent. To start I would reward her with a rest if she managed to cross a single pole without touching it, then a reward for crossing 2 poles and so on. Eventually we were getting all three poles crossed with maybe a light brush.
The second day was a repeat of day one except that I raised the poles with jump wings on their outer ends only by around 4 inches. Not much but it gave her a more painful consequence if she did not concentrate on her feet and hit them.
Of course I worked on other stuff each session as well, such as the ever popular hind quarter porcupine, but the essence of the session was her responsibilities on the circle. I think we made progress and I will do something similar on my next prepare to ride.
What I like about the Parelli system is that it always gives you clues as to what needs fixing if you hit an obstruction in your progress, and there is no disgrace in going back to previous sections to fix the problem. This I think differs from other systems. I am sure that many would have just plugged on with the riding to fix the problem, but that would have risked making the riding aids dull as I would have had to nag her to get through the issue.
In the long run going backwards is sometimes the fastest way to make progress
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