Slowing Down + Adding Lateral Work

TC has been pretty good this week! I'm still kind of experimenting with things to get us on the same page. After watching the last video I took (trying to take them every week), I noticed that when I thought he was forward enough, he was borderline running past his balance. 

He's always looked different than he feels to ride, which has been a struggle for me in the past (and now!). He looks more forward, more active, more responsive than he feels, and I've had instructors tell me to slow down when he feels like he's barely moving. 

I know a lot of this comes down to responsiveness, and in the past I've basically just added tension to get that responsiveness, and I'd rather not do that this time around.

TC likes to stop to say hi to Rico

Another big part of why I want to run him off his feet is the balking. The big thing I'm looking to feel is a commitment to moving forward without having the feeling that in the back of his mind he's waiting to stop. One way I was able to combat this when riding him before was to run him off balance so that it was harder for him to stop, then he felt like he was forward! Because he couldn't not be forward. But that was not conducive to collection and that's where things started to get really hard for us. 

And I think this is really making the balking worse because he is probably uncomfortable being that off balance, so he wants to slow down to catch his balance, and then I say no I need you to be forward. It's also not fully accepting the aids if the horse literally has no choice but to do the thing. Like if you slap a horse in draw reins, is he actually accepting the aids? Or is there no other choice? I need to give him the chance to balk in order to fix the balking. 

His neck looks great!

So in my recent rides, I've been challenging myself to ride slower. At the walk, I've been playing with some lateral work, asking him to take slow, deliberate steps. My goal is to make the steps more active, but for now I'm not working on that so much. We do straighten and march forward, but in the actual lateral work, I'm not hurrying him. 

Then in the trot, we trot slowly, but we trot slowly and we do harder work, like some lateral work or smaller circles. Then we straighten and we go more forward and he gets a LOT of praise. And then we slow down again (my choice) and he has to work harder, not super hard, just a little harder. 

In my last ride (yesterday), it did seem to help a bit? He definitely got to a more rideable place a little faster than usual, although I did ride earlier in the day. We were able to do a few fun exercises. The first was to do haunches-in at the trot to the right, I'm really working to get him comfortable bringing his right hind away from his body and to engage his left hind and he gave me some really good steps! Nothing too fancy or carrying, just mechanically good steps. And then to the left, we worked on some shoulder-in to renvers (again just like, the smallest amount of angle) and that was great. 

Rico did come over, TC was more
excited than he was though lol

As things got better in the ride, we did a little lateral work down the long side in a slower trot, then on the short sides, I'd counter bend him (not too much, just enough where his body was straighter than the line he was on) and ask him to lengthen his stride a little bit. 

We DID have two balks though. One was tracking left during a walk to trot transition, this was a really popular balking moment for him in the past, so it was not unexpected. I've been really fair (I think) about asking him to trot. I first ask with my leg + voice, then wait, if he doesn't trot, I ask again with my leg + voice and wait. Then if I have to ask a third time, that's when I escalate with my tiny spurs until he goes. 

When I do escalate, I make sure that he's MOVING but then I half halt back to the trot that I had wanted in the first place (vs continuing to chase him) - essentially he has to work much harder to get to the trot I was asking for than he would have had to if he'd just picked up trot. That time to the left, I got to the second ask and I felt him suck back. So that's the start of the balk, not just him ignoring me or taking his sweet time trotting. But once I escalated, he got moving pretty quickly after it, so not a bad balk like before! 

The lighting was weird, but TC is so
cute with him

The second one was during trot in another classic area. To the right in this one corner of the arena, we turn to go "uphill" and by uphill, I mean that my arena is a 1% grade, it's not actually truly uphill. This is a place where he likes to stall out and start hover trotting, so as we came around the corner, I asked him to please move a bit more forward. Instead, he threw himself through his right shoulder and darted inward, and when I put my leg on, he sucked back and went more sideways. This is pretty classic setup for a balk for him - I ask for forward, he contorts his body and then becomes ANGRY with me for expecting him to go forward from such a crooked place. But if I block him from becoming crooked, he balks really hard (head straight up, refusing to take a step forward) and becomes ANGRY with me for blocking him because obviously he's really just trying to go forward and needs to shift his weight to do so. 

For that one, again I escalated and then he was totally fine. I do think the spurs are a much better choice than the whip. I wish I'd switched a while ago. The whip sometimes would cause him to buck and that's something he can do... while balking. So I think I'm going to keep the spurs and just carry the whip for lighter aids like asking him to remember that he has hind legs. 

This is what I feel like at work AND
with TC right now lol

I was a little disappointed with the balking (although it really wasn't bad), and of course I considered overthinking it. But I did make a conscious decision to ride him slower and put him at risk of balking. I do think that's the right call. My hope is to give him confidence that I'm not going to run him past his balance, and to get me recalibrated to develop the feeling of forward from a more appropriate stride length. And unfortunately there will be times where his muscle memory takes over. 

And maybe there IS pain there, I will be scheduling him for injections again in February and we'll do the last things on our laundry list. But so far I feel comfortable pushing him a little bit up until that appointment (which is only like, three and a half weeks of riding since I'll be gone for a lot of January - and at least one of those weeks it will be pouring rain so it's pretty minimal work) to find out whether we can get through this. 

But by the end of the ride, he felt great. He was happily pretty forward (for him), we ended on a fabulous note of him doing some lateral work with me being able to actually half halt him to rebalance him, and he was super pleased at the end of the ride with his ears forward and happily marching out on the tracks to go home.