Sitting

At home, mostly, but also in the car and on the horse. And encouraging the horse to do so as well.

But TC is not built to sit, he is built to pull a cart. I am the dumb one here deciding to try to make a horse built to pull a cart sit down and carry himself and also me around.

Currently, TC is deep in the collection part of the training scale. We still work on the other rungs through warm up: he needs more energy/tone a lot of days, wants to get quick in the tempo, wants to retract from the connection, and wants to tilt to the right with his withers. But that's all addressed in warm up and then most days, we jump into collection.

The most difficult part for TC is the engagement, defined as the lowering of the haunches via putting more bend in the hocks during the stance phase of the gait. Another difficulty for him, being a lower tone horse, is to keep tone in his thoracic sling, which allows him to pop his withers up. Pulling a cart would not be very efficient if he kept his chest up and back and his hind legs well under his body.

Um this creature is not meant to be able to do this. The magic
of clicker training!

Soloshot decided not to get very much video of my right lead

So the collected exercises are going to be tough for him, namely the pirouettes and the piaffe. And we've started on both of those now in their lower level forms: school canter and half steps.

The school canter has taken and will continue to take a LONG TIME. He is learning to sit down though, and it's made the canter so much more accessible. I can now ride a pretty controlled canter half pass in both directions, not particularly steep, but it's recognizable! Good enough for Third level. And I've been playing with shoulder-in and haunches-in on a circle in the school canter, which has been helping me teach him that he needs to keep his front end mobile and his outside hind leg engaged which is, of course, necessary for the pirouettes.

Sitting him down in his collected canter

Letting him out of it, love his reach here, and how much he is
lifting through his chest, that's not a natural thing for him

The in hand work is stellar. He is such a pro already! His transitions in and out of the half steps have gotten better, he's much straighter, much more relaxed over his topline, and at this point, I don't even use the whip unless it's to touch him lightly on the hip, which he then gets a little surprised by.

OMG I AM SO SORRY, WILL TUCK BUTT MORE - TC

I feel bad for him when I do touch him and he gets like the above picture, even though, with a little work, that's a fucking amazing piaffe right there. He got immediately praised, fed grain, and got a break. That tension doesn't last though, he relaxes right after all of this work every single time. I've learned from several pros that this is absolutely necessary. He needs to be relaxed in this work, despite it taking everything he's got. So we do a lot of praising for relaxation before and after as well.

Generally, I'm so pleased at where he's at right now. I'm excited to be able to develop him the way I want to right now, without the pressure of shows or qualifying for All Breeds. I was hoping to do Second and Third this year, then Fourth next year and PSG in 2022, but as long as I can keep training him and all goes well, we may be shifting his move up date to PSG much sooner. Amazing how much progress happens when you can ignore shows and stop thinking of your horse as "my Second level horse" because he's doing so much more than that right now, I don't really know what level I'd put him at, but not just Second. Definitely food for thought for my plans to develop my next horse...