A month ago, I was very frustrated with my flatwork. At the end of April, I had a happy horse, swingy to some degree at least, schooling some lateral work and finally not exploding in canter transitions. At the end of July, I had a horse who could barely canter without an explosion of bucking, wrong leads, and cross-cantering. His back was pretty sore, his trot work was (beware, non-PC language ahead) completely gone to shit, and my position left something to be desired as the result of two fairly traumatic experiences involving my right arm and my fear of landing on it again, and basically, the only thing I felt good about were his grids and his trot sets.
We were going to Springpoint to pick up Aly anyway, so (what the hell) we threw him in the Neilmobile and headed down for a lesson with Caitlin, in which we reestablished some basic yet apparently easy to forget principles of riding Neil:
Being elastic in the contact is really important, even in transitions where my subconscious thinks there's a possibility I might die, and in the downward transitions, too. Rebalancing after canters is more seat and leg half halts, less locking up in arms.
Telling him he's good when he's good is really important (we will see more of this soon with Peter Atkins...since we can see into the future since this post is a month late).
Not letting him associate/anticipate before transitions and psyche himself into a panic attack canter transition...yeah.
There was a lot more to the lesson, but it was a month ago, so it's pretty decent that I remember that much of it. What's cooler than the lesson itself? The results a month later, when I have almost got that April horse back, except with better canter work- rough transitions, but not explosive, and cantering whole circles! There will at some point be videos...but one post at a time.
Also, baby horse has chest muscles. Whoop!
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