4th Lesson spending the whole lesson in an outline!

The title of this post says it all for me, for those of you that have been following my blog for a while you will know that when I first started riding Gatsby at West Hallam Riding Centre (29th September 2012) I was introduced in to the idea of riding in an outline, ever since then I have been trying to get the feel and some weeks I get it then I could go 2/3 weeks and not get it at all and feel really frustrated. Well the past four lessons that I have had I have been riding Gatsby in an outline the whole time, some of our transitions we loose it a little bit, but the majority of it we are in an outline in walk, trot and we are even starting to get it really well in canter. We have even started to get it in our jump lessons which before we never really bothered to do, we were more focused on getting over the jumps, now not only are we jumping but we are trying to get an outline in-between the jumps.

We started warming up long and low, normally I just stretch him out in the walk then start picking him up in the canter. This time i decided that it was time for a change and we started trotting and getting him to really stretch out while he was trotting. This got him moving from behind and really stretching over his back, it felt amazing, I'm not sure whether I have got a video of this part but I have got lots of videos from todays lesson.

When we started asking to pick him up in the walk initially he was pulling on my right hand and trying to get my right rein out so that he had more control. But by using half halts and lots of transition work, while getting him off my left leg he stopped hanging off my right arm, except when we moved in to canter and were cantering on the left lead. He also tends to want to fall out through his left shoulder.

I then moved on to doing sitting trot and getting him working in an outline, this work was really nice but we needed a little bit more energy. I needed him to really pop off my leg and get him going a bit more forward. But he was working real well.

When we moved in to the canter the left rein was awful, we fell out through his shoulder and he had a tendency of running. We started off doing trot canter transitions, which weren't the best but when I got hold of the right hand side again it worked really well. To the left we were able to do walk canter transitions and these were lovely we had a nice amount of lift and he was forward off my leg, he was also working in an outline in the canter which is something we've been wanting to achieve for a long time so I am really happy with the work that we have done today.

We cooled him down for about 10 minutes because he was really wound up and then we left it at that. It was really good, and of course he got lots of cuddles for being such a good boy during our ride today.

Until Next Time
A Girl With A Dream

CON ARTIST - NICKI WILLIAMS - BEWARE

Okay so this post has taken me a while to post for several reasons but the main one being just how angry this woman has made me. For those of you that have been following my blog for a long while you will know that back around October of 2016, I was introduced to a woman called Nicki Williams, she was a friend of a friend that was supposed to be opening a centre for rehoming and rescuing animals, but also for horses working with soldiers that has PTSD. We hit it off straight away and came what I thought to be good friends. However warning bells should have probably rang sooner. By January or February of last year the horses that I had agreed to look after (that she had got on loan) Bella and Arthur, she was being threatened that she would have them taken off her by the control of horses act, because she hadn't been paying the rent for the field. Although Nicki reassured me that she had done, she even showed my 'payments' that had been made to Angie. I ended up getti...

Magic's 2nd day in his new home

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In the Beijing Olympics in 2008 the horses used in the pentathlon were said to cause farcical scenes with fall after fall after fall. This was said to be the fault of the horses that were either hired or loaned to the competitors. It was not blamed to be rider error or a combination of both rider error and horse error, it was labelled as being the horses fault or this is what it said in ' Horse and Hound Magazine'. This horse was said to have been to spooky and sharp, but is it not a combination of rider's aids and rider error AS WELL as the horse being spooky. Can we really just blame it on the horse, when we are the ones that tell the horse what to do, by no means am i saying it was 'just the riders fault' couldn't it have been a combination of both?. For the London 2012 Olympics it was said that a total of two years if no longer was spent attempting to find the right horse for the right competitor. They made sure that the horse was at the right l...

The way to heaven is on horseback

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