Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Cloverleaf with Gem

Great session! Working on maintaining gait at the canter on the circle on the 22, then isolating the ends with soft asks (suggest). Squeezing over barrels isn't great yet, but he's getting it. We also had some nice figure 8's after a few minutes of him getting with the groove. He struggles going from the left eye to the right eye. I'll try to back up more and give him more of a release on that side.

Then, cloverleafs in the arena in the western saddle. Transitions and looking for softness and snappy transitions. His back up is very nice, but he over collects. Not sure how to fix that. Maybe I need to use just the stick in zone 1 and no reins at all. I got the most beautiful transition from trot to canter and we stopped on the X of the cloverleaf and called it a day for arena time. He's doing so great.

We went to the barn and started working on mounted sideways. That's tough for him and we haven't done very much of it. I tried to use the carrot stick to motivate him to move, but that didn't work so well. I need to go back to isolating the ends and getting him softer - right now I'm doing too much work.

It was a really nice session with him and I'm trusting him more than ever. We'll keep growing like this together and have some great things going in no time. We need to work on confidence away from the herd.

I redressed Z's wound and cut off more necrotic flesh. What a mess. Dang it.

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