Self Carriage in Canter

We have another lesson tomorrow and we've been working hard on everything from our last lesson. As I mentioned earlier this week, we found a nice hole in the canter work.

A lot of what are holes now are things I deliberately did to handle TC's behavioral issues. This is an example of a big one. TC went through a nice long phase where he bolted quite a bit, then all last year we did a lot of leaping and bucking. It was very much in my toolkit to get him used to the leg. You're supposed to put your leg on an energetic horse and keep your leg off a lazy horse, right?

Over the years, it paid off. He hasn't been able to completely dislodge me and the bolting/bucking has been reduced to a minimum in both intensity and frequency. Yay for perfect ponies.

The barn is beautiful in the mornings

However, part of self carriage in the gaits is not having to keep the leg on every stride. It's not nagging to keep him going, but it is present. That's bad. It's gotten to the point in the trot where I can mostly drop my aids and he keeps going. I thought we were headed that way in canter but then I realized that my calf has to be on him. After that, it's just spur and the whip that makes him buck, I need more of a spectrum of aids.

So on Tuesday I set out to have a really good ride focused completely on my leg aids, both how I'm using them and how he's responding to them.

Bench sniffer

We started with walk-halt and halt-walk transitions. I wanted to have an easy exercise to praise him like crazy when he responded to my leg. I decided to break the leg aid down into three separate aids to use, I guess four if you count the whip, which Tracey says not to. I started in halt and put just my calf on, Tracey wants him hot enough where I just have to tense my calf muscle to get him to go, but like... no thanks, I want to be able to twitch a leg and not have him leave the universe.

After the calf, I went to a bump with the side of my leg, or, for lack of a better word, I kicked him. But no spur, just a bump. Tracey told me to teach him that when my leg comes off is when he has to go, and she does this with a bump of the lower leg against her horse. I like this because it means I can forget to keep my leg on and my horse will stay in front of my leg - antifragility, hell yes. After that, he got a poke with the spur, although I want to refine that into maybe three separate spur aids: rolling up his side, fluttering the spur at him (future piaffe aid), and the skewer (for staying on bucks lol those spurs have saved me more than once). And of course, after that was the whip that I'm not allowed to use but still carry around for some reason.

I really never even got to the spur! He figured out the kick real quick and was totally happy to go forward when I put it on. He also began to anticipate it when I took my leg off, which not only kept him more in front of my leg, he started to offer way more self carriage while shifting his mass back. Almost like... if the hind legs stay under and active... the horse can... you get it.

Into trot and he felt GREAT, I did some walk-trot transitions, working on the same thing, then some shortenings and return-to-workings (Tracey says no more medium trot so we do no more medium trot). Lots and lots of repetition, at this point it was more for me than for him, I needed to make sure I was absolutely accurate with my aids every single time to drill it in there.

Time for some wandering

At the canter, he again figured it out quickly. And I immediately remembered why I don't ride him like this though. His canter is big on its own, but then it was absolutely on the brink of being out of control, or at least that's what it felt like at first. No wonder I wanted to hold on, and now I couldn't. I reminded myself that the horse was trained, but also gave myself a little bit of a break on not working on this until now, earlier this year this would not have been possible to work on.

But he held it together super well! He got more and more responsive to my seat and it just took the occasional bump with my leg to get him back under himself. From there, the medium canters DID exist from a squeeze of my calf thank you very much, as did some mostly decent canter to walk transitions when I managed to ride them correctly.

After cantering, his trot felt insanely good! I was super pleased. His trot work has been coming along, but it's been tough to get him to exactly the place where I want him so that I can stop focusing on the quality of the gait and start riding other things. This was that trot though, it was so easy! I just sat there (wheezing because omg his trot, I could do crunches and planks for ten years and still not be able to sit it easily) and let him move under me, just got out of his way. We got a really nice compliment from one of the riders in the arena when we were trucking along like that.

This perfect horse thing won't last long

I did school a bit of the haunches-in, mostly in walk again trying to get him sensitized to the aids I'm going to be using for it. It felt terrible as it always does, but the mirrors helped validate what I was working on. I was sitting more to the inside, I had his shoulders pointed forward rather than out (it's not shoulder-out it's haunches-in), and the angle was correct. It's going to take a while to get him comfortable in it, primarily due to my aids being a mess, but I'm determined.

Overall it was a fabulous ride! We had a nice long walk around the ranch to celebrate too.


I was walking him out down the back driveway where a bunch of cars were coming in for therapy (there's a handicapped riding school for kids at my barn). Everyone was so polite, waiting at the end of the driveway for me to walk all the way down it, but I kept waving people in. TC doesn't care about cars, he's lived at like three barns now where there were cars right by his paddock.

One family was reluctant and I kept waving like please don't be late to your class, TC isn't going to do anything. They finally came down and as I passed, stopped to say hi and I told them that TC was fine with their car. They then told me that they come down twice a week for therapy and that TC is their favorite horse on the property and they visit him each time. TC was just pleasantly looking in their car being all sweet like and I told them to look in my tack trunk and they can give him a cookie each time they're there. I said that he was very gentle (he is shockingly gentle with cookies and kids) and that he'd appreciate the attention.

I think I'm going to get some special cookies to put in my trunk and leave a note for them (I want to describe how to get him to smile) just in case they take me up on it. Life can't always be made easier with new leg aids but it can be made easier by giving a sweet horse some cookies and petting his very soft nose.

Finding the Collected Trot

On Saturday this weekend, I zipped over the hill to ride TC in another lesson!

I was really excited for the lesson because I had been on the fence about showing this coming weekend and wanted Tracey's input. She is an S judge, so she knows the levels inside and out. I told her last week that I was being a waffle about it and that I'd test ride and then come see her and we'd talk about it.

Test riding went well last week, but I just kept feeling like the level of throughness wasn't quite there yet for Second. And I was right, Tracey veto'd the ordeal and we're waiting for October. I'll expand on why in a post later, since we obviously can get through the test just fine and I still think we could nab a halfway decent score.

It was still a great lesson though! And knowing that I wanted to show the 2-1 at some point this year gave us a good plan for where to go lesson-wise now that Tracey has gotten my position back in gear.

Wandering

We started in walk and she wanted us to walk with more intention. She told me a story of her riding with a famous trainer when she was a kid and something he said stuck with her: find a walk that could take you to San Francisco. So I did, something more forward, though last week we were told to slow down, and the week before we were told to speed up. This is a freaking journey! I've also heard "sit left... no, sit right... no, sit left" and "don't snatch the outside rein... don't just give away the outside rein... stop pulling on the outside rein, Megan!" throughout all my recent lessons. So we're still finding a happy medium with all of those things.

The trot felt really good! She liked that I timed the transition correctly - asking for the trot when he was oscillating his neck forward so that he wasn't sucking back into the trot. Oh, I've mostly just... asked for the trot and completely disregarded the timing.

The trot itself was good, though it took TC a second to stop staring at everything and get his ass in gear. He did and the trot improved quite a lot over the course of our warm up.

Love this barn (his new home barn not my trainer's barn)

To celebrate the trot feeling so good, I rode some shit corners and shit circles. Preparing to go Second in a week and being harped on about Training level geometry, hell yes.

I think it's just TC's tendency to lose power steering sometimes. I'm really not sure what to make of that just yet. I need to do some thinking on it. But the minute that I was harped on about my geometry, I snatched the outside rein to feel like I could actually turn him. Tracey told me that I needed to get him more connected to that rein, stretched to it, so that I could then half halt and ride him around the turn from his outside shoulder, vs just kind of, pushing him away from that side. This is what she thinks is causing a lot of the leaning in. So we fixed that and then I ruined it several more times.

I deserved this after putting up TC's fence lol

The canter was okay. He's been feeling amazing at home in the canter and there's just something about my trainer's barn that gets him real bogged down in the gait. I went to ask for it and he pushed back at me, so I swatted him with the whip, so he jumped sideways, and then we tried again and it was fine. The same thing went down with the transition the other way. One bad transition to start and then we're good. Tracey's feedback was to not use my whip so much in the transition, she says that he responds well to light tapping, but a smack to get him into canter just makes him react poorly to it. Yeah, she's right. No more whip unless it's tapping.

Once we actually WERE cantering, he felt really good. Tracey began working with us on establishing a little bit more self carriage. She said that I needed to be able to push my elbow forward and have him fill the contact and sit down more, but when I let go of the rein, he just breaks.

It felt really good to be in the place where we're working on self carriage, since we haven't really ever gotten there. He has so much push back that I've always wanted him to go TO the bridle. Tracey says yes to that for warming up, then start to transition into collected work. Time to differentiate.

Not quite good enough for Second, but good for us!

We then chatted about the test and I said that surprisingly, the trot work was worse than the canter work. She said that her only qualm so far with the canter is that it's "borderline too big" which is true. Especially at that barn. So we'll continue to work on getting it contained.

Back in trot with my shit corners and shit circles and snatching outside rein, I showed her our questionable shoulder-in. In both directions, he wants to get neck-in rather than shoulder-in, so I went to correct it and got told not to leg yield. The throughness issues stem from that outside rein issue. He's either busting through it or I'm holding it completely rigid and he's against it. So I need to be able to give it up and keep him turning with my thigh. Hrm, that's not a button that is installed apparently. At least not enough to take the responsibility away from the outside rein.

Once we got it though, we freaking got it. Damn this horse is cool. And with all the lateral work, Tracey said that he wasn't pushing out behind nearly as much as he was before and that she'd consider that "baby collection" aka okay for Second level! So that's great.

Such a good boy

At the end of the lesson, we confirmed no show for this weekend. My goals have changed and I'm not chasing medals, there's no reason to do the show when we can just wait and have a more solid and fun debut. I'm a little bummed in that this means that I will have no scores on his record for 2019 (since October is 2020), but in the long run, it really doesn't matter. I'm excited that she thinks we can do it by the end of the year.

Back Undersaddle

I rode my horse yesterday! Like in an enclosed space! For the first time in a week and a half or so.

I stopped riding him mostly because of my own issues, I was getting frustrated and that's not the way to deal with a horse with a lot of tension.

Since my last arena ride, he's gone on a few trail rides and also been chiropracted (thanks Kate for arranging it!) where he was deemed as being pretty messed up. He was struggling with his lumbar area, which was basically frozen. It's a normal thing for him, though I didn't realize how bad it had gotten. Definitely getting her out regularly for a while!

I opted to ride him in the round pen, which kept me in a better mindset than I think the covered arena would.

Round pen! 

My main goals recently have been to get TC more comfortable in self carriage. Both in the bridle and just being able to pick up the trot and not just get faster and faster and faster. He needs to be in charge of his own balance. In addition, I want to feel like my aids go through him and he stays with me.

I've watched two of Kate's recent lessons with new trainers and both of them have very different perspectives (one isn't a dressage trainer actually) that made me think about TC's situation and I applied things from them on Monday.

I started at the walk on a loose rein. When TC would get distracted, I would take the inside rein and bring him around on a small circle (trainer 1) to redirect him. Rather than add tension when he's distracted, I just changed the subject and insisted that he stay with me without closing any doors (outside rein remained loose). TC slowly relaxed a bit and while it wasn't as dressage-oriented as it will eventually need to be, I did feel like he stayed with me and was way softer (in a non-dressage way) than he had started out.

Lots of grass in the paddock (well, not anymore)

From there, I did some turns on the forehand (trainer 2) to help him loosen up his lumbar area and be able to put my leg on him without him zipping off. I also paired this with a rein aid. Trainer 2 is probably not someone I will ride with, but she did have a really good point to say that she likes to pair the rein aid with engagement of the hindquarters, so then when you use the rein, the horse thinks with their hind feet. I was able to use my inside rein in combination with my inside leg to ask him to step over with his inside hind leg and I could feel him soften both to the rein aid and over his back.

We picked up the trot to the left and it felt really great, he still wants to get charging though, but his whoa button is real sharp right now, so I didn't feel like I had to hold him back so much with the reins.

To the right though, complete disaster. I switched to sitting trot and got the familiar zippy feeling before I came back to walk and worked on the turns again. I kept him in the turn on the forehand (which is way more like shoulder-in on a small circle than an actual turn on the forehand) from rein and leg aid and then asked him to trot and holy shit, he stayed with me for the first time tracking right in a long time. It was hard for him, but instead of running off, he just walked when he got fatigued. If he got quick, I could increase the angle of the turn and he'd get his hind legs under him and slow down. All of this with minimal connection on the outside rein, so he never got to that claustrophobic place where he wanted to bust through the reins.

Portrait mode is endlessly entertaining to me

It wasn't perfect and we have SO LONG to go before I really feel like I can ride him for real again, but the point is that we had a really positive, fun ride with no major bolting or tension.

My plan is to continue working on this stuff until it becomes way more ingrained, and then back off to a schedule that still includes long lining at least once a week (also a trail ride!). With him out in the paddock too, days off can happen more often without me feeling bad about it. So I think his life will be very different this year.

Generally I'm feeling really good about this progress. I've been working a lot on myself with taking off the pressure of showing (and showing because I want to not because I feel obligated to) and just freaking enjoying my horse and the process of training him. It's been a really fun few weeks and I'm looking forward to returning to dressage with a better mindset and a horse with a better foundation!