I had a pretty good ride on Uno this week. It is definitely still frustrating that most of my ride is centered around just move forward horse.
I do have a pretty good routine with him. He likes a walk around the barn before we ride so that’s our walk warm up. I’ve found that he is more willing if we do that first. Then, we get our first trot out of the way. If he isn’t doing a good trot, we do a bunch of halt-walk, walk-trot transitions. If he isn’t hot of my leg, I give him a smack with the whip. He’s gotten a lot better since I started using this method. I only need to do this once or twice a ride now.
We got the forward pretty well this time. I still didn’t completely have the feeling of him in between my aids but we weren’t dumping on the forehand or slogging around. I like to do figures and things to make the ride interesting but Uno was always terrible with this. We actually got a fairly decent serpentine going this time. Most of the time I’m struggling to bend or straighten or not slow down to absolutely abysmal speeds. This time, I could just focus on bending and straightening and he was following! Not a bad ride.
Scarlet is doing well. I took us down to 15 seconds of trotting 2x per week. He tweaked his right hind a few weeks ago and it got puffy. Only took 2-3 days to be completely cool and tight again but I was worried it was because of the trotting. So we took some time off and then we started back up at 15 seconds at a time. He has had three sessions of the 15 seconds and seems to be doing fine so far. I’ll keep that up for a bit and then maybe increase it depending on how he’s doing.
Also, a bit of a teaser but I hope to have some exciting news next week to share!
The Horse Dream 