Flying Changes!

Rocked the girl colors for our lesson :)

Pony and I had a dressage lesson tonight and he showed up to play like he always does! We started off working on getting a nice connected walk and took that into a shoulder in at the walk down the long side. Now that we are doing 2nd level I really need to work on being a strong rider throughout my whole ride not just when I am asking for a certain movement. I would get the shoulder in then totally let him get away from me on the short side. We are now at the point where I need to be riding him in shoulder fore all the time, keeping that inside hind leg engaged and ready for whatever I ask. I still let him slip out of working at some points but I could really feel the difference between the two so I could correct him right away. We ended up getting some nice shoulder in and I am putting the pieces together as to why we sometimes have trouble with it. I tend to ask for far too much angle and not enough bend, once I fixed those we got some nice ones! He likes to swing his hind end around to get out of really pushing (not that I can blame him!) so we then worked on taking the haunches in coming around the corner into a shoulder in down the long side. We also transitioned between shoulder fore and travers on a big circle. We got some really nice work doing that and will definitely add that to our rides. It will only help us advance our half pass as at any moment, depending on what your horse is doing, you may have to do either to correct it to get your half pass back on track.

I was super happy to hear that the work we have been doing in our trot half pass work is really correct. Now that we have the idea we just need to work on refining it. It needs a little bit more of everything, but given how little we have worked on it I was happy to hear that we are going in the right direction already. It is all really hard work for him (and me!) but will get easier as he get stronger.

Then at the end of ride we got to do changes! We picked up the canter and took it across the diagonal, not changing leads, into the counter canter and brought it onto a 20M circle in the middle of the arena. Coming around the circle off the wall I changed bend and viola, pony change! The first one we did he was late in the back but only a stride or 2, not to shabby for our first real dressage pony change together. One thing that I was doing was holding him back too much going into the change, he needed a little burst of energy just before asking him. The next time I asked we got a clean change and ended on that note! This pony is SO cool!

Can you believe this was us just 2.5 year ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERZ11m63fbc

He was just about 60 days under saddle (riding about 3 days a week lightly) and at his first show in that video. It is amazing how much better he is now! Not even just in his training but even his movement has improved because of his training. I have my eye on a dressage schooling show in November/December for our 2nd level test. Hopefully we can make one of them!

In his cooler he won last year after our lesson!

He also got his hooves done today