Last night I had the first lesson that I've had for a while. I really enjoy my clinics but I want one person to be able to keep an eye on Mort and I as we progress. Some of you may remember a barn-mate and I hauling to several lessons last summer and this is the same instructor as then (but now she's going to come to my barn). We mainly worked on lifting for more collected work and discussed how to build-up Mort so that he can start to handle more pressure.
While Mort is getting fairly adjustable in the trot he still sometimes likes to curl behind my hands and leave me with nothing. I haven't really had a good response to this in my struggles. I've either taken more rein and then tried to convince him to go back into a longer frame--often leaving me with a cramped neck. Or I would give him a touch more rein to have him hopefully stretch on his own, but that has actually been rewarding him for curling.
She had me half-halt and lift my hands up so that I had a light contact with the corners of his mouth as opposed to the bars. While I felt like I was lifting my hands to saddle seat levels (I wasn't), it did have a really good effect on Mort. He felt lighter in both the bridle and the front end while not being as tight and stuck in the neck. We struggled some with losing our left bend, but for the first time riding like this I think he did really well adjusting. A lot of the ride was us working on sitting and lifting followed by letting him stretch down again (and often re-establish the proper bend) then back to lifting. This is definitely something we'll be working a lot on in the coming weeks.
The other main takeaway of the lesson was creating a Mort who is better at handling the pressure than inevitably comes with training a dressage horse. Mort isn't a horse to explode but if he feels too much pressure he'll get tight and reactive and I can really struggle to 'unlock' him again. The plan is fairly simple. I make a bell curve of pressure in the ride so that Mort doesn't think that our rides just get harder and harder (getting him more and more tense throughout the ride). Within that bell curve he gets a ton of little bell curves where I'll ask for something more difficult for just a few strides then let him have several easy strides. The idea is that he'll learn that some pressure is ok as I'll never keep it on all of the time. Overtime, those moments of pressure can get longer and longer.
We touched on a few other things in the lesson as well. She started our haunches-in focusing on the hind leg crossover first then messing with the bend which is the opposite of what I've been doing, so I'll have to see how that progresses our work on that. We played a bit with the medium trot--something Mort definitely doesn't have fully established yet. I put him in an ever-so-slight shoulder-fore right which really helped him feel more even behind. I also need to push through the ugly stuff and just let him figure out more of what I really want for a medium as opposed to just a lengthen. She suggested trying it on a large circle so we'll play with that in the coming weeks as well.
I'm really excited to have homework again. It can be hard for me to pick specific things to focus on when I want to do all of the things. The next couple of weeks will be full of little projects now! I also need to start taking another look at the first level tests. The first weekend of October will hopefully be our debut at a recognized show.
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