Only groundwork with Filly recently as I haven't felt well enough to ride. Hopefully today will be different though.
In lieu of riding I have been going back to basics a bit with the groundwork. For example Filly had forgotten her responsibilities on the circle of maintain gait, maintain direction and looking where she is going. She was also still very defensive about steady (porcupine) pressure on her sides to get her to move away.
First the circling game. Of course we only use circles when doing groundwork as we can't move fast enough to keep up if we do not. In addition the leader of a herd of horses tends to be the one who moves their feet least and by circling we can stand still and make the horse move a lot. However the lessons learned on the circle will translate into more linear patterns when ridden, especially the responsibilities.
My aim was to get two laps at forward walk, forward trot and forward canter with no interference from me once the direction and gait had been set. This is an advancement of the basic circling game where only the gait matters. Here I wanted quality of gait as well. Should I have to remind her of the need to maintain the desired gait the circle count reset and she still had to do two circles to get the reward of a rest. Thus each session consisted of many more circles than just two, but as soon as two good quality circles where achieved she got to rest.
The game for her was to figure out what she had to do to make sure I did not give her a cue and for how long she had to do it. This is different from normal lunging a horse where they are constantly reminded what to do. This develops them physically but not mentally.
It did not take too long to get the desired circles and so I can build now from 2 to a goal of 6 circles with no interference.
As for porcupine sideways we had, over several sessions, got to the point where she was beginning to accept the pressure and move lightly off it. But it was still with some attitude. Now she was at least partly thinking about things during the porcupine game I could add obstacles to negotiate as I directed her with finger tip pressure. The obstacle yesterday was a pole on the ground with a cone at each end, and the task was to go along the pole sideways with the pole under her belly. This put a purpose to being manoeuvred about with porcupine pressure. After four or five goes she suddenly "got it" and the resistance largely melted away and we got some really nice sideways. Lots of licking, chewing and even yawning from her showed she was finally relaxing to the idea.
In lieu of riding I have been going back to basics a bit with the groundwork. For example Filly had forgotten her responsibilities on the circle of maintain gait, maintain direction and looking where she is going. She was also still very defensive about steady (porcupine) pressure on her sides to get her to move away.
First the circling game. Of course we only use circles when doing groundwork as we can't move fast enough to keep up if we do not. In addition the leader of a herd of horses tends to be the one who moves their feet least and by circling we can stand still and make the horse move a lot. However the lessons learned on the circle will translate into more linear patterns when ridden, especially the responsibilities.
My aim was to get two laps at forward walk, forward trot and forward canter with no interference from me once the direction and gait had been set. This is an advancement of the basic circling game where only the gait matters. Here I wanted quality of gait as well. Should I have to remind her of the need to maintain the desired gait the circle count reset and she still had to do two circles to get the reward of a rest. Thus each session consisted of many more circles than just two, but as soon as two good quality circles where achieved she got to rest.
The game for her was to figure out what she had to do to make sure I did not give her a cue and for how long she had to do it. This is different from normal lunging a horse where they are constantly reminded what to do. This develops them physically but not mentally.
It did not take too long to get the desired circles and so I can build now from 2 to a goal of 6 circles with no interference.
As for porcupine sideways we had, over several sessions, got to the point where she was beginning to accept the pressure and move lightly off it. But it was still with some attitude. Now she was at least partly thinking about things during the porcupine game I could add obstacles to negotiate as I directed her with finger tip pressure. The obstacle yesterday was a pole on the ground with a cone at each end, and the task was to go along the pole sideways with the pole under her belly. This put a purpose to being manoeuvred about with porcupine pressure. After four or five goes she suddenly "got it" and the resistance largely melted away and we got some really nice sideways. Lots of licking, chewing and even yawning from her showed she was finally relaxing to the idea.
2 comments:
Hi Tim, I'm trying to follow your blog but keep getting an error message. We used to meet on the sadly missed Parelli SC forum: chevalblanc. I have an RBI so relate to a lot of your posts about Filly. You write so clearly and well!
Thanks Sheila. I also miss the forum, but left because of the policies. Managed to have a personal chat with Neil Pye about them and he was going to look into them for the PC forum.
Thanks for your kind words about my blog.
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