The way to heaven is on horseback

Well magic and I have been back to working harder than ever, after our lesson with Fiona I did some more work with him on Thursday and then he had Friday off as he just looked tired to me.  On Saturday I had an amazing lesson on gatsby, the amazing horse is still just as amazing as ever. We worked on lots of lateral work mainly leg yield but we started to do little bits of shoulder in all though this is something that I still struggle with. We also did bits of Canter work and he was being such a good boy, we worked mainly on my seat and making that more effective but we also worked on my hands as out of my whole body my hands are my biggest problem as they move quite a lot. We did some canter work, making sure to get a nice contained canter but with plenty of energy.  We then called the lesson to an end as gatsby was really starting to struggle with the wind and rain  that's was beginning to happen. I then went and spent some time with magic and got a very responsive ...

For my lesson this week I got to ride Vettie, I had the choice between him and Gatsby. I chose Vettie because he is a lot easier to ride and also because he wouldn't hurt my hips because he is not as wide as Gatsby. Before I got on Vettie I explained what had happened and we decided that we were just going to take the lesson easy. We did a lot of walk work, working on getting him to an outline but I was having difficulty with my left shoulder so we put him on his bungees (not sure if i spelt that right). This was to help me get in the outline but I needed to remember that I needed to keep working not just let them do all of the work.  When we moved up to doing the trot work I was struggling to keep my position still but Fiona said that was to be expected after the accident earlier in the week. I still got some nice trot work but it's not as nice as the work that I had got out of him the week before. We also worked on doing some shoulder in and leg yields and it was so ...

This morning I woke up just in time to go for my riding lesson, when I got there I got to work on grooming Gatsby and I was amazed to see how shiny he was. He looked so clean. When I went to tacking him up we decided that we were going to make a few changes. First of all we took away his martingale we might use it when jumping him but for now when doing flat work we aren't going to use it. We then changed the bit, I can't remember what bit he had got in before, I think it was a gag. But then we put him in a snaffle with a lozenge joint.  As soon as I got on him the difference was amazing. He was forward and responsive and I was still managing to almost get him in an outline so I was happy with the work that we were doing. As soon as I asked him to warm up and stretched he dropped straight in to working long and low and it felt great. He was really swinging in the walk and it felt so nice to not constantly be putting my leg on to get him more active. We all noticed the diff...

Today we have been driving all the way to ripon in Yorkshire, to meet and pick up my brother from his annual camp, which he wasn't enjoying. Me and my mum woke up at 6 am got dressed, picked up Hannah his gf, and drove all the way to be therefor two minutes and to then leave again. So I decided that while we were driving home that I would take the time to post and update you all :) Well so far there has been nothing remotely horse like in my day except driving past a horse box and saying wish I was ridin now! But so far no luck maybe later though got to stay positive Today Ive decided to spend some time talking about lateral work doing things like leg yielding, pushing the hindquarters out on to an inner track in a school. When I first started doing leg yielding with gemma on a Wednesday night I thought tht whilst it was good it was also quite hard but I did really enjoy it the first thing that I did was work on turning on the forehand, I did this mainly when riding Gatsby but...