Ride: I squeezed in one last lesson before I am forced to take a lesson-hiatus for about a month due to term papers & finals in April. My friend Sarah came out and took some wonderful photos - so this wont be as wordy as some of my rambles tend to be. ;)
We started off with our regular warm-up, and then went on to practice two-tracking. I need to remind myself to keep my reins much shorter so that I can really use my leg and reins to effectively build that block to keep his momentum forward, but also sideways at the same time, instead of him kind of jumping in and out of it.
From the two-track we went on to practicing roll-backs, every.single.rollback I have to remind myself to bring my arm way more out to "open the door" into the turn. It's working, and he's getting snappier through his turns now, instead of lazily stepping through them.
Then we did some more work with ground-poles, first just a line and then my trainer set up a box, with two of the poles elevated by the two others, so that Jingle really had to pick up his feet while going over and through. Sidenote - tried this by myself and woefully missed my trainer who would pick up the poles after Jingle knocked them off, not a good exercise to do alone.
& then, from there, we practiced the gate!
My trainer walked me through each step quite a few times, and we'd practice one part and then just stop, pet, and wait, and then move on to the next. Jingle's biggest problem is moving his hindquarters over when I need to swing around to close the gate. The gate is a really good exercise because it gives me something to judge against and for something that he can translate into an activity. He's always been "stickier" in moving his hindquarters independently, so this will be a really good exercise to practice to get him to more freely move with his rear
For Next Time: Work on all of our trail obstacles, and work towards more limberness with Jingle's hindquarter movement.
After that, Sarah took some fun photos with our shadows, and we had some good laughs.
This one is my favourite.
Playing with shadows.
Dream team.
