Today was another "in-between" ride. I decided to do a lesson since I'm off work for the next two weeks to study and this would be a good motivator to get me out of bed early!!!
We started out in the large outdoor arena again and got a little break from circles. Instead we were working on getting her to stay on the rail in a relaxed working trot. For the first three years that I owned Secret, we didn't have an arena at either of the two barns where I boarded -- I was a grad student, ie. poor. So, she's really not used to be asked to stay on a rail or even stay straight, so we're having to re-teach that. She also tends to get really anxious in the outdoor arena for reasons that escape me because she's usually perfectly fine on the trail; sometimes I wonder if it's just boredom.
She started off acting pretty silly along the rail, just randomly tossing her head and making militant 90 degree turns to the middle of the arena. My trainers advice was instead of trying to pull her head back to the rail, because that messes up our pretty bend to the inside, OPEN the outside rein keeping the outside hand up, wiggle (multiple half halts) on the inside rein, and LOTS of inside leg. It's amazing how well this works, but you have to approach it with alot of patience. I have to tell myself that I have the WHOLE arena to get her back on the rail and then just keep harrasing her with the above maneuver until she gets back over there, however long it takes. At first it sometimes took the whole long side, but as the lesson went on she got better and better.
The next component was getting her to consistently stay in a relaxed working trot. This has always been a struggle with Secret, especially in bigger areas. She always tends to get excited and wants to get fast and choppy as opposed to lengthening her stride. So today we were working on making sure that I stayed relaxed and then controlled the cadence of my posting. The more I can do that, the more it will encourage her to relax and to lengthen her stride in time with my posting. Keeping a certain cadence to your posting sounds really easy, but its hard to do. I always want to match her pace and it's hard for me to set my own when I can feel her pushing me out of the saddle. The good news is that when I'm able to do it, she comes back to me really quickly.
When she was really going around on the rail consistently and relaxed we started to do some large serpentines. For these I would half-circle into it, then walk a few strides to straighten, start the opposite bend and ask for the trot. Once my trainer felt as though we were both doing this well (for our first time anyway). We decided to move back into the smaller indoor arena for canter work. During our trot work earlier she had gotten excited and done a bit of canter (almost one full long side at one point) and it had seemed less scary to me than before. So, we had thought about doing some canter work outside, but I was worried that I would get scared again and set us backwards, so we went in.
In retrospect, I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't have the courage to try to canter in the larger arena, but I'm always VERY happy that we went in because our canter work was AWESOME today. She did great in both directions, staying on the rail and not breaking to a trot in the corners. She also did well with the canter-trot tansition and actually continuing to trot instead of abruptly just dropping to a walk. Both my trainer and I were thrilled!
I have to say that I think it's really beneficial that my trainer has ridden her a few times. Its given her a chance to learn all of Secret's little tricks that she likes to pull on me so that she can help me work through them. It's definitely helped to lessen my frustration and its made our communication better because we've both experienced it and I don't have to describe what's going on in exquisite detail to get help. Totally, TOTALLY worth every penny.
No comments:
Post a Comment