Lisa's Blog post # 44

Awesome ride today!   Our disciplined conditioning is beginning to show and we have moved on to fine tuning our goals – yay for progress!  The fact that it was a drop-dead gorgeous day didn’t hurt either – yay for living in the South!

Now that I can get Cotton round on his French Link snaffle at the walk and trot, we are working on increasing our time staying round.  I really have to get after him when he hollows and wants to take a peek around.  I think he wants to see if he’s missing anything.

Yesterday Lesley was out on Ollie, Lyn was out on Frodo and Cotton was just besides himself!  We usually ride alone – maybe one other horse will be out with us – so having 2 horses was evidently a huge distraction.  This woman sitting on top of him, poking him and pulling on him, was the last thing on his mind!  I ended up ditching my trot work to gallop a little and then work on canter transitions. After that he stayed round at the trot pretty well – maybe because Frodo had retired to the barn!

Anyway, when Cotton hollows I immediately sit the trot, with what I guess is called a driving seat, to get his hind end underneath him and rapid fire tap him with my legs until he gets back to work.  Lesley encouraged me by saying that the quicker I am to correct him, the less he’ll do it.  I’m interested to see how we’re doing by the end of the month.

Another goal we have embraced is our canter.  Ever since Lesley gave me her little 2 sentence lesson right before Thanksgiving about getting his back loosened up before I ask for connection our canter work has been so much easier!  We are doing walk/canter transitions so Cotton is forced to carry himself.  As we improve I’ll canter for longer and longer periods of time.  Right now we are just going a handful of strides before I put the brakes on – with my seat of course.  I can definitely see the correlation between good departures and good walk transitions just a few strides later.

It’s tricky getting his right lead so I’m trying to figure out what I do that makes it work sometimes and not at other times.  Even when he’s bending to the right he will throw his hind end to the left right before he strikes off, putting him on the left lead, so I really have to pay attention to get him to hold his correct position.

Of course, I am also really focusing on my position as well – I know what I’m supposed to do but actually doing it is a whole other thing!

I’m thinking that with some of the basics kind of under control, our progress might really begin to snowball!