Still

Yep. Still Sore. Right in the area where the muscles move above his flanks. On both sides.

I opted to lunge in sidereins and work the trot-canter transitions. I figure that if he is unable to do them smoothly without me on his back, they he's really going to struggle with me riding him.

We did lunging for about 40 minutes. He did about a gazillion transitions. To the right he holds his head higher than to the left, but after a dozen or so transitions, he finally settled into a nice canter. When he transitioned down, it took him a couple of tries to understand that I wanted him to settle back into the smooth, quiet trot he was starting out from. By the end of moving to the right, he was no longer throwing himself forward into the canter. His head was still pretty high though.

To the left we started out with a horrid canter, with lots of head tossing and cross cantering. He was more worried about me than what I was asking him to do. I finally figured out that he was concerned about the carriage whip and dropped it. He was able to relax and cantered very nicely to the left. He had his tail up for the majority of the work. He did some nice long stretchy walks in between the trots and canters.

I decided to try and cue him with verbal cues instead of my heel, because he is blast snorting at me when I touch him with my heel. If I cue him verbally, that's one less thing I need to try and coordinate. And honestly, he's so sensitive that if I cue him verbally, I probably don't need to use my leg. We will see how that works tomorrow.

I gave him 2g of bute when we were done. Hopefully, the little bit of work today will help the muscles stretch and relax by tomorrow. I'm going to ride with N during her lesson.