Sophie is accepting of contact now, at the walk. I generally let her walk with her head wherever she wants it, as long as I have a steady contact (she no longer throws her head at the walk, otherwise I would worry about it more). I will half halt and use my inside leg to push her into the outside rein to encourage her to come round, but I don't focus on it by any means. I collected Sophie back up to begin, using a lot of strong half halts to encourage her to walk up and into the contact, it wasn't the best walk in the world, or the most through, but definitely an improvement.
We then picked up the trot, have I mentioned how good our upward transitions are getting? I really think Kim is astonished by how quickly we've been progressing and how *good* Sophie is. We did laps around the arena, working on really improving the trot and getting me to focus on making half halts nearly constantly, to keep her active, forward, but engaged. First we would get it just right for a stride, and then two, and then four. It was amazing how different Sophie felt. Once we improved enough around the arena we began a 20 meter circle in the center, where we worked on more half halts to encourage some actual suspension.
After that we moved on to trotting leg yields down the long sides, as well as working on lengthening the trot down a short diagonal. The lengthenings kind of sucked, but the leg yields were great. After a short walk break we worked on the canter. She was still sucking back and then raising her head when we cantered, so we worked on trot-canter transitions. My big problem is I still tend to brace through the transition, and I had to work on letting go, half halting through the transition. Unfortunately I needed a break after a few of those, so we walked for a bit and then reversed.
Once we reversed we worked on the canter to the left and tried something different. Sophie was so *on* that we decided to ask for a lengthening for a few strides before asking for the canter, to avoid the sucking back. It worked, I had three or four nicer transitions with some good jump to them and less bracing. After that we worked on leg yielding, which wasn't as good in this direction. After the leg yields we worked on walk-trot transitions which were *much* better. I discovered that they are lovely when I release the inside rein in between half halts entirely. Poof, perfect transition, so I'm going to try that when cantering to see if it helps there as well.
We also did some more lengthenings on the short diagonal and they were much better, thanks to the feel we'd discovered while doing the canter work. We did try some side passing around the corners, which also helped us work on our trot-halt transitions (which were lovely!) but Sophie was getting tired and let us know that she wasn't thrilled with more work. So we did a couple of stretchy trot circles in both directions and called it a night.
In all I rode for about 45 minutes with the warm up and the lesson. It was a very good lesson and Sophie was awesome. She's lost a little weight, so we'll probably up her hay soon. Kim said that when she was getting 2 flakes at night she wouldn't eat it all, and would have some leftovers when cut back to a flake. But once I restarted lessons she's been cleaning up every bite.
And on another note, now that my riding lessons are cominig to an end, I'm going to start taking piano lessons. Weird, huh?
1 comment:
Wow! It must be so rewarding to feel these improvements. It's so amazing how horses seem to plateau for a few sessions and then suddenly leap up to the next level. I'm really happy for you both. Now you can write a song for the piano about leg yields ;^)
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