the everything pony
who would really much rather eat all day
Nov 10 Lesson
That I am FINALLY getting to after a month haha. This was a pretty good lesson. Amber was certainly a bit lit for the majority of the trot work and a bit reactive. But I think that’s more due to her being unbalanced and a bit fatigued. I generally don’t ride her longer than 30 minutes, and our lessons tend to be around 45, but I have been filling that 30 minutes with less walking.
This lesson was definitely about figuring out Amber’s balance. I asked Genevive to work with us on our serpentines and transitions, though really the whole lesson centered around those serpentines once we we figured out that Amber was having trouble with balance. In the rides preceding this lesson, Amber got really quick and unbalanced curving left, which helped me decide to inject her stifle to see if it would help – and to just help her stay more comfortable. You can see in the video after we start trotting that she’s being a very good girl and trying, and then just gets super imbalanced when we try to do the right curve through the cones. After a few off steps she got the balance back, but I was very glad that Trainer G had been able to see one of the issues we’d been facing. It just…happened on a different side, but it works haha.
I was really glad I had my helmet cam for this ride. It proved really good for me going back and listening to our conversations. There wasn’t too much in terms of variety. Most of the lesson was focused on that one serpentine exercise, with a little bit of canter and a little bit of free walk thrown in there. But, one of the biggest nuggets of wisdom I took from this lesson was Amber’s bend pattern. You can see in the video (and I add Genevive’s explanation) that Amber is bent from her withers forward, but she has no softness or bend in her ribcage. The main exercise for this was to get her hind leg stepping underneath her. She over bends from wither to poll, but this put the pieces together that I hadn’t even been realizing I’d been searching for. I’ve mostly been thinking about pieces of her body to create that curve of inside leg to outside hand. When Genevive introduced the ribcage with hind leg coming under, it made my mind suddenly transfer that into an image of a whole body bend that starts with hind foot coming under.
And boom there it was! It took Amber a little bit to get it, but once she did, she certainly tried her heart out every time and I could feel the difference. You can definitely hear me praise her in the video when she tries lol.
The biggest problem in the lesson was that she wouldn’t settle until we had a long walk break. She was too fast most of the time, and that fatigues her muscles more quickly. This isn’t really conducive to lessons, so I’ve been thinking on ways of formatting the lesson a wee bit differently, and discuss with Genevive whether this will work for her or not. This lesson gave us some good homework though!
5 Comments on “Nov 10 Lesson”
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the everything pony 
Sounds super productive! I love helmet cam lesson videos too for being able to remember exactly what all the trainer was telling me
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Thanks! Yeah it really helped!
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It’s so nice to read about you two getting back into the swing of things re:lessons!
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Thank you! I’ve certainly missed it 😊
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It’s so nice to read you guys getting back into the swing of things re:lessons!
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