In which I am boring…

In case anyone cares, I thought I’d better explain the lack of updates.  Basically, Joey is being well behaved at the moment, even with the 1-2 rides a week he is getting. 

I know – that’s nothing! He is handling it very well however, and we are working on forward, forward, forward.

And it’s boring.  Because I hop on, walk, trot, canter around the arena, and then I walk him out down around our jumping field and hop off again. 

That’s pretty much all we do at the moment, although I am pondering starting up some cavaletti training.  We have progressed a lot with the trust issues, but I’m not convinced that we still wouldn’t have big battles over the painted poles as he was just so consistently banged in the mouth whenever he did pole work with his previous owner.

Interestingly enough, he doesn’t seem to have any problems with logs or branches.  He does the green horse looky-loo, but will walk over them happily enough.  So maybe I should start there?  I don’t know. 

What I do know is that I really want to start lessons again.  I think I’m slowly feeling my way forward with Joey’s frame at the moment, but I don’t want to get these basic levels of the “Dressage Pyramid” wrong.  They are the foundations to everything and as I don’t know much about what is beyond the basics, I don’t really know where we are heading.  So that’s a problem if I don’t get some guidance stat.

Forward is a good start, but I really want to engage his hind end, as the more I do that, the better (obviously!) he will work.  He needs to soften and give in his whithers/base of his neck and I’m not sure how to go about teaching him how to do that correctly.

Circles aren’t really cutting it for us at the moment because as soon as I start circling him, pretty much all of the forward dries up.  I have been trying to ride a ‘diamond’ shape instead, and that seems to have positive results. 

But the bending isn’t there, as the softness needed for a correct bend isn’t there.  So suppleness is an issue.  I think once I get forward working properly I can start concentrating on suppleness. 

Huh.  I guess I have more to say than I realized!

See ya,

bonita