Despite Welshy nearly making me stupidly late, I went for the stables for a ride again. I decided recently its something I wanna take up seriously again and get back to my former levels of goodness.
It was a really good lesson, one of those where I really achieved something by the end of it, Pebbles is a stroppy little pony at the best of times and the start of the lesson was a real fight between the two of us, to get her to do what I wanted, rather than taking it easy and chilling out as she wanted!
But by the end of it, she was bending and being really flexible and really working to please me and enjoy it herself rather than grumpily huffing her way about and then going back for a snooze.
We worked on basic bending and circles, its always good to go back to the basics, especially as I've forgotten the diameters of how large to make some circles, and learning how to bend properly and flow around corners, instead of just turning sharply was the real highlight, again it just re-enforces to me, how much harder riding gets the more you do it. I mean to learn to turn as a beginner, its all sharp angles, left rein, right leg, for example to turn left. To actually have the horse bend with the corner as it goes round, there's just so much more involved. The outside rein needs to be higher, the contact with the horses's mouth needs to be more precise, the inside rein needs to be more centralised to help support the neck, your weight needs to adjust and lean with the bend to allow the horse to move its own weight easier, you need to keep the pressure on with your inside leg to encourage the horse to move over!
So much going on just for a simple turn!



oh and did I forget that all this was carried out in canter without stirrups? Gonna be stiff tomorrow!