Forgiven for yesterday

Two posts today - don't miss the pix on the first one!

I forgive Jazz for yesterday's misdemeanours. We have had a brilliant lesson with Sonia. For a start the driving wind and rain on this side of the High Peak was completely absent from the other side. A good start.

Even better, there were lots of changes to the arena, with the drainage now mostly complete in the field alongside, and horses were being ridden across the field next door, and a dog was playing in another one. Jazz is programmed to react to change and although he clearly noticed all of it, he didn't misbehave at any of it. He concentrated really well, and his submission was very, very much improved.

Sonia commented on how much he had improved in two weeks and seemed quite surprised and very pleased. Today we worked on roundness and activity, and got him really sitting down and bringing his shoulders up and out. This is still with my legs off, with well-timed half halts, and with a lot of work where we slow him right down until he is almost forced to break into the pace below, then ask him to go forward again. He did some super stuff. (On downward transitions, she has me slow it and slow it until he IS forced to drop into the pace below.)

We did some leg yield, easy peasy to move over, but not quite so easy for him to stay in the outline and do it, so a good exercise in more submission. In the exercise after the leg yield she said "His problem is that he thinks too much, he's still thinking about that leg yield instead of what we are doing now - you can see it written all over his face". She really can read a horse, that's for sure.

Jazz's canter was fantastic today on a circle and we began to move it around the arena while trying to keep the quality. I felt like I learned an awful lot about how to sit him, where to put myself and when to hold and when to give with the rein. I am certainly sitting more upright than I have for years and my contact is more consistent than it has ever been. Interestingly, we found that sitting right down into the saddle with as much weight as I can (not driving forwards, sitting downwards) improves the roundness of his canter, which Sonia says is not the case with all horses.

In walk, she asked me to get him to walk as short as possible while staying active, and then said to keep it as short as I could and touch him carefully with the whip. He skipped a couple of times, kicked out once, but tried hard to work out what we wanted. Then she laughed and said delightedly "he's going to be so easy to teach piaffe". Starting piaffe on our second lesson, boy am I smiling or what?

When we finished she said that he is "very clever" with his back legs and it's obvious that she thinks he's a seriously good horse. I had a really good time and enjoyed the lesson immmensely. He can stay another two weeks until our next one :-)))

C