Installing the GO Button

Before I start, look at a current conformation picture of my animal! He's on a muscle builder and I think he's looking pretty good, his butt is all round and his neck is pretty beefy for a horse who has had a little pencil neck most of his life. He's eighteen and a half this month! Btw, his coat looks weird because he had just had a bath and was drying all funny.

In order to get him to look like this, I threw a rock in front of him

This post will be broken up by a few recent phone pictures/instagrams :)

This week Heidi is in Kentucky so Rico and I are on our own. I've decided to work on a few things that keep coming up in my lessons so that when she comes back for our next lesson, we'll be super impressive.

The first thing I want to do this week is address the forward issue. Rico isn't reliably forward, and a lot of my lesson is dedicated to pausing the movements we're working on, and sending him forward. Every single movement is a thousand times better when he's in front of me.  

He's only forward when jumping. Our last jump school was this

In the past I've been like "well, he just has to be GOING all the time then" and ran him off his feet. This doesn't work for us. It makes both of us stressed and pissed off. Knowing this, I came to the conclusion that Rico is never going to be 100% reliably forward. He won't voluntarily stay in front of me at all times without me doing something periodically. Too bad, I bought the wrong horse, he'll always suck back. I'm going to just have to deal with it.

I decided that what I need is to install a button that gets him in front of me, and make that button reliable. So then, when he inevitably gets behind me in some of these movements, I have a way of getting him back in front of me within a step or two and then go back to the movement. 

Sounds pretty similar to having him in front of me all the time, but I now have a different mentality about the whole forward issue. Having this button means that I'm not scared he'll get behind me because I know we can get out. And this means that I will ride less defensively. I installed it on Sunday and on Monday I had a MUCH more pleasant ride.

Someone got new shavings recently...

Basically now whenever I slip both legs slightly back and tip my upper body slightly forward, Rico knows that he has to GO. I spend the entire ride on Sunday doing that at all gaits and when he ignored me, we galloped forward.

Heidi had me change my riding schedule, so we now do piaffe and passage every day for one of our work sets. After Sunday, I decided to add one work set for just energy, so now our ride is this: 5 minute warm up, 8 minute energy work, 8 minute piaffe and passage, and then 2 more 8 minute sets of whatever else we're doing that day. 

Please stop working me so much!

Monday I did the warm up and then reiterated him that I wanted that go button ready to be pushed. Then we started the piaffe and passage. WHAT a difference from even the day before! Rico felt GREAT in the passage and I only had to shoot him out of it a couple of times. I now can just brush my legs slightly back and he adds energy, and as long as I put my legs back to the passage button in time, he doesn't break gait. The paiffe was better than it has ever been, I actually felt like we could do it for the 12-15 steps required in the test without having to kick and cluck and tap the whole time.

I then went into canter and just worked on a few changes and keeping him in front of me. He was great! The changes are okay... one of the symptoms of him being in front of me is that I've been quieting down the changes for so long to reduce the kicking that he doesn't do them well when he's forward. Oh well, I'll address that later when he's stronger. Heidi thinks it's a connection problem so once as his topline is bulked up a bit more, that will be easier.

Rico feels pretty well connected to the front lawn

With how good he was being, we did some pirouettes for the other two sets. I wanted to work on a few things:

First the energy. If he got behind me, I'd do one of two things- I'd either shoot him out of it, or I'd touch the energy button and then go back to the pirouette. I want him not knowing whether he's going to have to leave quickly or not so that he stays on his toes. 

I then wanted to work the biomechanic. I tend to push his haunches way too much to the inside and we go WAY sideways first. That was almost perfect! Go us!

Finally I wanted to work on getting the right pirouette to turn faster. Success... sort of? An ideal pirouette is 6-8 strides. We went from 14 strides to 4 strides (aka spin) to 8. So we ended well but there was a point in the middle there where I thought Rico wanted to be a reining horse. 

The full moon over my arena the other night

Overall I was VERY pleased with those two rides. Today Rico has off because the last two rides were so hard, and then it's back to work on Wednesday and into the weekend. This weekend boyfriend is at a bachelor party so I'm having my own horse-filled bachelor weekend with my best friend who is helping me house sit at my parents' house. We'll hopefully go on a trail ride with Rico and Stretch and she's promised to teach me some of her photography skills (which are AMAZING).

Trail ride!

Next week we have a Heidi lesson on Tuesday and then I fly out to Socal on Wednesday to visit boyfriend's family and my brother. Rico gets a Heidi ride and then three fun days with my mom.

And in other news, one of the neighbor cows had a baby!!