[Lesson] 9th April 2015

With Pea's recent clear from the vets, I decided to book in for a lesson and get properly cracking with him as I'm hoping to get out near the end of the month for second round trailblazers. I was slightly apprehensive of how he would behave as he'd been in the majority of the day and had hind shoes on for the first time (and as per Pea's style, caused trouble!), but it was actually one of the best lessons we've had. In fact my instructor even said it was the first normal lesson we've had as the few I've had with her so far have either been him being a bugger, slightly lame, or assessing him without working on improving him (we've not had a great deal of lessons to be honest!). 

To start with I just gave him a walk, trot and canter round. Straight away Cathy noticed that I back off from kicking him on more and that we're stuck in this rut of a mediocre trot which I have always thought to be an alright trot but in reality he needs to move more which helps him actually bend his hind legs. We did a little exercise where I had to really get the trot going, but then as soon as I felt him back off ask for canter, and then ride a 20m circle into a figure of 8, returning back to trot and trotting round until he backed off again. It meant that it gave him a different exercise to do as he wasn't certain what would happen next and also really got him to move in the trot so I now definitely know the difference!! 

We then moved into canter and worked on my not being afraid to push him forward as soon as he backed off. As I've had a lot of issues with canter in the past, it got to the point where Pea knew that if he backed off just a bit too much I would back off as he used to buck a bit mad so I lost confidence in myself to push him through it. Slowly, I'm getting there and he's more happier in canter, but I still need to really work on ensuring that I push him through it. 

We also worked on 20m circles in trot and I realised that I haven't been riding them 100% correctly so definitely need to work on them! We then moved onto doing some flexion with him to the inside and outside in all three paces. He was definitely worse at flexing to the left so my left leg had to seriously work hard to achieve it but I'm really happy with how it went. Flexion in the canter is a major issue with us as he literally bends completely wrong and we both get so unbalanced but we're going to work on it and hopefully we'll soon start to see some changes!

Thanks for reading,
Laura xx