Ride #12: Increasing the Difficulty

Amanda called off on Wednesday sick, so we had our lesson tonight. The other student that I usually share lessons with wasn’t able to ride tonight, so I got Amanda all to myself.

It was cold in the indoor and although we walked for fifteen minutes, Ashke was bouncy and forward when we moved to the trot. Amanda thought he might be cold, which would make sense, since I just clipped him again. We moved into an extended trot to a collected trot and then began working on our leg yields as Amanda finished up her lesson. 

Once the lesson started, we did shoulder in, haunches in and then haunches out, before crossing the diagonal at the medium trot and doing the same series of exercises in the other direction. From there we moved to the trot serpentine, where I was really working on keeping him straight through his body. We did canter-walk transitions in the serpentine, then Amanda had me canter him on a big circle, with a shoulder fore feeling on the long sides. That was hard because he is an over achiever and wanted to throw his hips in or out or somewhere. However, he was better at containing his chaotic energy after we started to canter. And he was trying and obedient, only spooking one small time.

After the canter we went back to the trot work and did leg yields up and down the arena. Amanda doesn’t want to have the chaotic energy build so we are using trot work to interrupt.

We then did changes on a diagonal line across the arena, getting three changes in the cross. We did it twice and he waited until I asked for the change. I told Amanda that what we needed to work on was proper bend after the change. In some of the changes he is a little counter bent. Amanda had us do a canter half-pass for three or so strides, then straighten, ask for the change, and half-pass in the other direction.

We did it but it wasn’t Uber pretty. He was late behind so there was a pretty big bump in his back end to correct the issue. Kind of felt like a buck but I didn’t think it was. I thought he was having issues making the change. Amanda said he was trying to figure it out. We tried it a second time:

Not bad for our second attempt.

The It will be a fun exercise to work to perfect, since it will really help solidify the bend in our canter transitions. It was our first real ride in a week and he was amazing.