June 20, 2011
So today Prince and I played with the different patterns and tasks that we are doing as patterns, 4-7 days, the main ones being circles at a canter and sideways to the end of the 45ft line while I stand still. While circling we continued to play with Prince maintaining the correct lead for more than just 3/4 of a lap. This time what I did was place a barrel standing up on the fence to help Prince learn to turn there instead of going farther and then loosing the circle. If Prince cantered a circle, and I mean a circle, then he can stay on the correct lead but when he makes part of it bigger or small that is when he looses the lead. So there was one part of the circle where the fence ends (the only place we can do circles in our riding rind is at the end so Prince is going a long the fence for part of the circle) that he was going straight for a stride or two and getting messed up.
Having the barrel there made a huge difference and Prince was able to canter to the left, his hard side, and maintain the correct lead much easier! It is all about doing less sooner rather then more later ;)
Going sideways to the end of the 45ft line is going really well. Prince will usually go sideways to the end at a phase one but sometimes he still gets a little stuck so we played with that and ended when he went sideways to the end, both ways, at a phase one or two, mainly phase one.
We also did a little bit of leading by the tail and Prince was very light! We backed about 20ft or so and Prince put not only lightness but a lot of speed into backing up. It was great!
I decided to do something a little differently while riding today. I set up two barrels about 20ft apart and the plan was to ride a big figure eight around them, starting at the trot and then eventually going into the canter and doing a simple lead change in the middle. Now how I combined the Figure eight pattern and Follow the rail was that our riding ring is small so we would go through the middle of the riding ring, pick up the canter, canter around the round (the riding ring has rounded ends because of the limited space we had when building it), and then come down to the trot while riding between the barrels and pick up the canter again in the other direction. So basically we were riding a figure eight the size of our riding ring.
We started at the trot and then once Prince picked up on the patten and we went into the canter. I decided pretty quickly though that to have success we would need to ride circles on each side of the riding ring and Prince be able to do that before doing the bigger pattern. So we set of doing that instead. Prince got the lead to the left easily and the circle was great but while going to the right Prince had a much harder time. I had to get off a couple times and reiterate what I wanted as Prince was starting to buck when I asked him into the canter. So we would switch it up a little and Follow a long the rail when Prince was having a hard time getting the correct lead, going back to something he knew well helped him quite a bit, and then switching into the circle. It took a while but in the end Prince was able to canter a lap and a half and then we stopped in the middle. I gave him a long rest, dismounted, unsaddled and let Prince out to graze on the side strip of grass for a little while as I picked up everything and took stuff down to the corral.
Then I brought Prince back into the riding ring and let him out the gate so he could go down to the corral and get relief from the bugs in the shelter.
Naturally,
~Keri-Lynn
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