Gia - session 79 - The first of many "pole lessons"

On Friday, I was going to get a video of Gia's piaffe at the mounting block, but she actually stood almost perfectly still.  The good news is that she stood still.  The bad news is that you don't get to see her piaffe ☺.  Her walk also started out a lot more relaxed than usual.  It was raining pretty steadily while I rode her on Friday, and I believe this was our first rainy ride, so that may have had something to do with her quietness.  Since Gia has been doing so well with the poles, and seems to enjoy the work.  And since I don't want to just come out and do the same thing day after day with her - walk, trot, canter, etc, which would create boredom and resentment and would diminish the joy she currently has in her work.  And since, one day, we will want to be ready to jump anyway.  I decided to start working with Gia on a variety of pole exercises that I have.  I have a wonderful book that has over 50 different exercises you can do with just poles on the ground.  This will not put any additional stress on her joints, and it will prepare her for the day when she is ready to actually go over a jump.  So, we started with pole exercise number one.  Basically, you place two poles on the ground, parallel to each other and about 6-9 feet apart in the center of the ring.  Then you execute a figure 8, going between the poles each time you go through the middle.  You are looking to have two nice, round circles with a period of straightness in the middle when you go between the poles.  You can do this at the walk, then the trot, then you can add walk-to-halt-to-walk transitions and trot-to-walk-to-trot transitions in the middle of the poles, and all should be done with the correct diagonals and correct changes in the middle of the poles.  If you are one of my students reading this, and this exercise sounds familiar, that's because it is!  I use the same pole exercises to teach students to jump as I do to teach horses to jump.  Gia did fairly well for her first time with this exercise (I will include a video in the comments when I post the blog on FB).  She was a bit crooked at first, but was definitely improving by the end.  Later, when I moved on to work on the canter, I widened my circle at one end of the arena, and she actually pulled me toward the poles!  She definitely understood the exercise!

Speaking of cantering, Gia struggled a bit with her canter to the right today.  She keeps wanting to throw her haunches too much to the inside when I cue with my outside leg.  When she does that, she loses her balance and can't get the transition into the canter, so she just speeds up the trot.  Each time she "misses", I bring her back to an organized trot and try again.  It took several tries to get it on Friday.  It's pretty typical for a horse to be crooked like this in one direction.  When we cantered to the left, however, she picked it up right away and cantered very balance for several circles.  Then I went back to the canter on the right lead.  She still struggled with it a little, but it didn't take as long, and she was able to keep her canter better the second time around.

We finished up our ride with a bit of turn on the forehand.  I didn't have to use the whip at all!  She knew exactly what to do, and executed it perfectly!  She did go a little too fast when I pushed her to the right (due to the same reasons that the left lead canter is harder).  I only asked for that one once, and then asked her to move to the left several times.  I am always striving to get the horse to be equal on both sides, which means I have to ask for more on the harder side and less on the easier side in whatever we are doing.  It can be very tempting to overdo things on the easy side, because they are, well, easy.  However, that will only make the asymmetry worse in the long run.  Horses are similar to people in their asymmetry.  While we say people are right or left "handed", we say that horses are right or left "sided".  It basically means the same thing.  In horse training, we are always striving to get horses to be "ambidextrous" (or "ambi-hoof-trous? ☺)