Letting Him Warm Up

TC is up to 16 minutes of work now! Which is not no work, so that's pretty cool. I don't think he's been this fit in a while, since he got the summer basically off and last winter I didn't do too much with him. 

The way I have it structured is to do 1:30 minute trot sets with 1 minute breaks in between. Then every 3 trot sets, we change direction which I give him 2 minutes to do. This works out to 4 overarching directional work sets. So left, then right, then left, then right. A total of about an hour in the arena (if you include the 12-15 minute walk before and after all of those trot sets, which I sometimes do on the tracks). 

My next goal is to collapse those into 2 minute work sets, except instead of 3 sets, we'll do 2 sets. That will keep us at 16 minutes but be lengthening the amount of time that he's trotting. 

From a recent trail ride

The reason why I'm doing it this way, and this slowly, is that the problem I've had with him is that he gets really balky about transitions and frequently slams on the brakes while I'm riding him. So I started him with 30 seconds of trot and we've slowly worked up to working longer, with plenty of breaks in between. 

I figured that this would help him mentally understand that he will never have to work forEVER and that he will get breaks, just not when he demands them. I think we both fell into this pattern where he'd slam on the brakes and I'd keep hustling him along and I'd probably work him longer than I would have if he hadn't slammed on the brakes, basically showing him why he should slam on the brakes in the first place. So having this schedule, and having it go super slowly, has been really good for us. It's us working together against the rehab schedule, not against each other. 

It also means that we do more transitions! So I've been able to watch the way he does transitions and encourage him when he does them well. When we started this rehab, he was kind of hopping into trot, like hurling himself into it with his neck. This still sometimes happens, but it's not happening nearly as much as it used to. I've also started doing some transitions within the gaits and transitions from walk to trot and trot to walk, as well as a few here and there adding some steps of canter. This has helped him stay more engaged mentally too! 

He's been a nut to trail ride recently

And finally, it's been really good for me to see him warm up and get better as he works more. I definitely think I'll be longeing him before riding him when I do start riding him. He starts out just kind of slow and a little stiff, not lame but not energetically moving forward. The other day, I was trying to convince myself to not work him because he looked so bad. Like why am I tormenting this poor horse. 

But I've told myself to blindly stick to my rehab plan until next summer when I confirm that it hasn't worked. And so I kept asking him to do his trot sets. And you KNOW WHAT? He worked out of it and looked the best he's looked in a while by the end of his work. 

I think his muscle wasting and his balking slowly led me to baby him a little (a lot). And for good reason -I do not want to beat my horse through a dressage test while he looks like a rescue case. But I think it softened me a little too much. I've noticed this in my personal training sessions, where my trainer has figured out when to really push me (when I am just complaining) and when to pull back and either change what I am doing or have me do some prehab exercises before continuing (when I mention my hip injury). But he never has me stop working out and go home. So I'm channeling that for TC too! 

Keeps hitting his deer threshold and
then using his new cardiovascular
fitness to have feelings about it lol

I think my goal is to get him up to about 20 minutes of work and try to have the work sets be something like 5 minutes each. I do want that to take time. The nice thing about this system is that I can notice when he starts to offer to walk and wait until he's not offering too early in the trot set before I move him up.

But really, I'm just winging this. My primary goal is to have him in completely full work by the end of the winter/spring (maybe 30 minutes total work? ideally with 6-8 minute work sets) so that we are going into the tougher summer days with him super fit and happy to work. Who knows if we'll actually make it there! I'll keep hoping and keep moving toward it though.