A little too sticky

Posted on August 4, 2017 by the_everything_pony

Amber and I had a pretty good ride yesterday morning. It was only half an hour but I’m pretty sure the first fifteen minutes was the both of us just waking up. We were not all there brain wise. Alas, it was just too early for the both of us.

There was cloud cover, so it was actually cooler than it had been, and it wasn’t so humid that it was unbearable. But for sure we were very discombobulated yesterday. Most of it was my fault, as it usually is, and we were both just still in that “waking up” phase. But I wore my horZe full seat breeches, and I think it was a little too sticky.

I felt like I couldn’t get control of my lower leg AT ALL. I also felt like I was trying extra hard to post, like it was hard to get my butt out of the saddle. Which is probably the full seat compared to how easy it felt with my relatively slick knee patch Ovations. The full seat has helped me tremendously with my stability in my 2 point so I can start getting more confident and stronger in my position, and hopefully, I’ll get stronger is my dressage position to eventually be able to wear them for dressage. I did get them for that after all.

So our left side trot work felt so weird yesterday. I know most of that is because I’ve been trying to shift more weight on my left hip. I think usually horses have let their shoulders fall to the left, so I inadvertently started leaning to the right to fix it and now I don’t know how to put weight back in my left stirrup. But I know that it’s the right fix because when I do fix it, Amber goes straight and into a great frame and is very soft in her body – walk, trot and canter. So I really need to work on breaking the habit.

Also when my weight shifts back to my right hip, I noticed my right elbow starts to pump like a chicken wing. You know, because THAT helps soooooo much.

Her canter though was pretty spot on. She knows how to take off from her outside hind, but she has a huge tendency to just barrel down with her front end into the canter. She’s gotten so much better about that, and once she kind of hits the end of my hands, she gets herself back and softens very nicely. We’ll need to fix that initial step into the canter, but all in good time. She’s doing very well and I’m very pleased with her. I wish we could’ve done some pole work, but I just felt like we didn’t have enough time yesterday morning and I just wasn’t awake enough. Good thing I didn’t because….well. That would’ve been bad.

But I got my new Ogilvy half pad yesterday! I was thinking it might be a slightly darker navy, but I absolutely love it, and I think I got a pretty good deal on it. It’s precisely my colors, and I think it’s going to look great with all my stuff. I’ll be sure to take pictures of it this weekend so you guys can see the full look!