Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Prince: Lightness, speed and distance on the circle...

January 4 2010

Prince came over to me after I had unhaltered Ruffian so I haltered him and then I decided to start by playing with and around the log. We stared by doing some yo-yo's, looking for lightness, speed and distance. Then we did sideways in zone 1 from 22ft away. At first Prince was being a little slow and sluggish but then I asked him to trot to me and jump the big log then back up to it. This really got his attention, I don't think he was expecting it ;) 

After that we did circles! I drove him from zone 5 over to a clear area and then sent Prince off on the circle from zone 5. It was an different way to send him but he figured it out right away. Once I saw that he had the rhythm, relaxation and connection at the trot on the circle we played with some changes of directions. At first they were really rusty so we had to play with them and get them lighter and more snappy. Our drive was good but our draw was what we were having issues with today. So we did quite a few of those until Prince got lighter and until over all the change of direction got better.  

Then we played with getting rhythm, relaxation and connection at the canter on the 22ft line circling. We haven't played a lot with this recently because of all the ice and such so it was nice to be able to play with it again. Prince did really well and even though he had a hard time at first getting the rhythm he was able to find it and in the end he cantered very nicely with rhythm, relaxation and connection! Pretty much the whole time he kept the slack in the rope which was really nice to see! 

Going to the left was a little bit harder but that was no surprise because that is Prince's harder side. We just kept with it until he was able to get the correct lead and maintain gait while also keeping the slack in the rope. He tried really hard and pretty soon he got it nicely.

After that we took a little break and then went and played with some more yo-yo's, sideways, and then I just wanted to do a little bit more with our changes of directions because where we left them it was good but I didn't have a really good idea of where we had left them because we went into playing with the canter. Prince was really light and we got some really nice changes of directions at the trot. They were 100% better than they were when we first started at the beginning of our session. 

We ended there and Prince stuck with me for a long time even after I let him go. He actually took a little nap and then all of us, mom, myself and all four horses, went home :) 

Naturally,
~Keri


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