Since the vet appointment, TC has felt great! I rode him on Tuesday and Wednesday, he got yesterday off, and then I'm heading out to ride him today.
On Tuesday he was wild, obedient, but wild. He had Sunday off, then the only thing he did on Monday was get hauled to the vet to be checked out and then hauled back home. So by Tuesday, he was really needing to DO SOMETHING.
We basically got zero things done that day because it was all I could do to keep most of his feet near-ish to the ground. So that was a bust.
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| He looked WAY better than he felt that day |
Wednesday was a stressful day at work, we had federal reporting due and I thought it was finished but I had a bunch of it pile up. I finished it before my ride but I was pretty twitchy and my boss messaged me like 5 times in the first 15 minutes of my ride and I kept worrying. TC couldn't handle my shit so I got off of him and hand walked him to the covered arena, turned off my phone notifications, and took a deep breath.
He luckily recovered immediately because he's the best and we had a fabulous ride in the covered arena (which is our comfort zone currently).
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| Buzzy pony |
As I said yesterday, I noticed in my last lesson with Tracey that TC's transitions were probably a huge part of why he isn't going as well. He's always been rather difficult to ride through transitions. Obedient most of the time, though he will sometimes get stuck in an upward transition and refuse to go anywhere. But he loses tone through them. Tracey had us practice a few, but on Wednesday, I came out wanting to do a bunch of them.
Just like Anne and Jec discovered, the more you throw at him, the better things go. I have a very bad habit of just going around and around, and I put a limit on myself with how often I had to change something. TC got better and better, the transitions slowly improved, and he looked (and felt) really good in the mirror.
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| That neck can get so short when he's not under my influence ugh |
I want to come up with a good warm up for TC and I think for a while, it will involve a lot of transitions. Once he was thinking about sitting down, being on my aids, and keeping his tone up, he was way easier to ride. His gaits felt better, he was sharper to my aids, he felt easier to ride.
One of the kids I teach has a very strict warm up and I keep adding new things to it and taking out things that the horse comes out doing perfectly. I think it really helps set both them and their horse up for success each day. The horse knows what to expect and the rider can use the warm up to determine if anything is off with their horse.
I didn't think much of it until I realized that my warm up on TC could be summed up with "walk around the ranch, trot and canter around in working gaits, get to work" while my rider's warm up includes transitions, lateral work, and lots of figures. So I'll be adding transitions to TC's warm up, and maybe some other stuff too! Anything to get him feeling as good as he felt on Wednesday every day.
