Transitions Transitions Transitions

Last night Rico and I had our first lesson back after his injections and my back injury! It went very well. We worked primarily on the piaffe and passage, including our first lesson on transitions between the piaffe and passage and the walk-passage transitions.

First let me start by apologizing for being a little MIA recently. I've been completely losing my mind a bit stressed over graduate school. All posts I attempted to write in the last two weeks or so ended up being a massive bitch fest about graduate school and had nothing to do with the horse other than "I couldn't ride today because I got on and started freaking out so we walked around a bit."

Now, however, I'm feeling better. We only have one more paper which I have done and one more (take home) midterm which I'm almost done with. The work isn't over with but the massive stress that was this week is now dwindling and I'm so much happier.

I was feeling better enough to actually take my lesson last night! Yay!

Like I said, I came in asking Tracey to look at the passage. Since she last saw us, the passage is much better, and she agreed. She said that he's very even which is awesome because when we first started, he wanted to flick his right front way out instead of really lifting. She now wants me to start playing with transitions within the passage. So I'm supposed to ask him to cover a bit more ground, then bring him back, then go forward again. I could feel how he struggled with that. He's kind of stuck in one movement which is great but makes it difficult to do any sort of transitions in and out of the passage without him falling out of it. More on that later...

We then moved on to the piaffe. Apparently Rico is finally learning to SIT in the piaffe instead of just do the half step shuffle. Tracey told me that I did a good job keeping him moving forward and not pushing him to be too much on the spot. Right now since he's learning, it's important for him to learn to be active and step up to the bridle in the piaffe rather than getting backwards and sticky. Eventually when he's stronger, bringing him more on the spot will result in a really quality piaffe! Nice :)

Rico needed a little breather so I asked her about transitions. I've played with them a bit and it's HARD. The only way I get good ones are when Rico is feeling too good and I risk being launched.

She said he was strong enough now to begin playing with transitions as long as I took it slow. Progress!

We first played with the passage to piaffe transition. A lot of horses, she said, struggle with that since they kind of drop into the piaffe OR they stay in the passage and just passage in place. Rico tended to drop which isn't a bad thing at this point. He understands, but he can't keep his rhythm yet. No big deal, I'm supposed to play with shortening and lengthening the passage and continue strengthening the piaffe.

The out was... entertaining. He knew UP was the answer so he'd usually fling himself out of the piaffe sideways, then trot two steps, THEN passage.

The same thing happened when attempting the walk to passage transition. This damn thing has been the bane of my existence and I wasn't all that enthused about having to do it again. Leo took a LOT of leg, he made me work for it, so the first time I did it on Rico... he stood up.

Whatever, it wasn't big and technically he did do what I was asking.

Those got MUCH better once as I stopped aiding so hard and he realized that I wasn't trying to get a rear out of him.


Overall I'm super pleased. I feel like we're making some real progress with these upper level movements that were once impossible.

Oh so I have some awesome conformation pictures of Rico buuuuut they're on my desktop computer and have not been edited yet. So I may edit this post and add them later!