Friday, May 16, 2008

The balance experiment

We did a little groundwork before tacking up and going out back. We had the twenty-two foot long line and our halters. Ranae was first up. Dusty went off okay. You could see in his eyes he was wondering what was going on. Ranae trotted for a while working on her seat. We did a yield to a stop in both directions just to make sure I had control of Dusty. After a couple of minutes Ranae was comfortable and wanted a LFR stage two rollback. Dusty works off his but pretty good and she thought that was quite fun so we did it a few more times. Then I set him off in a canter. That was pretty good too. He's a pretty good horse.

Jessie was a little nervous about the whole thing. Her trot was pretty big and quick. She kept moving in on Ranae and making the circle smaller. She was also really leaning in when going to the right. This has been a trait I was aware of and trying to work on. Ranae had been offering advice and that and the things I've tried haven't helped. We did a few LFR II rollbacks too then stopped and talked about the leaning issue. I asked Ranae if she wanted to ride Jessie. She got on and experienced first hand the "lean". She was wearing spurs and tried to use them to get Jessie's shoulder up, but to no avail.

It was a fun experience and we'll try and do it again. We discussed some other things to do that might help. One might be to ride a square instead of a circle. That will get her to straighten up a little...I hope.

It's going to be a hundred degrees here today and maybe even tomorrow and Sunday.

1 comment:

Tuff e Nuff said...

That's awesome John! I need to do that some more myself.