Too much leg!

So after a week off of lessons and still recovering from a nasty ear infection, I managed to have a wonderful lesson on Friday. We worked a lot on leg yielding, both in the posting trot and the sitting trot, getting Radar to a point where he is straight before starting the leg yield and figuring out how to encourage more sideways movement. I actually was using too much leg (seriously, I never thought that would be an issue!) and had to play around with how to use my outside rein as a a supporting rein of sorts for encouraging sideways movement. It's weird to think of doing that, after I spent so many years trying to not have my horse drifting through the outside shoulder to the rail in the leg yield to realize that using that rein is sometimes very helpful and provided the half-halt Radar needed. Did some really good sitting trot work and got one amazing canter circle totally unintentionally... it felt really good! It made me dizzy, though, so we kept it at one each direction. Radar was such a good boy and definitely deserved the peppermint he received after my ride.

he likes me, he really likes me!

Friday:

I had such a generally pleasing ride on Friday. When I went to get Radar from the gelding pasture he started chewing as I put the halter on, and he was "relaxed", shall we say, during our lesson breaks. We did a lot of work on leg yielding bending left, since that's his more difficult direction, and did fairly well with it. Did a bunch of canter circles, including a right lead one at B that was actually successful! I was slightly worried about the prospect of how steering would work but it did.

Tuesday:

Despite a bit of loose horse drama (practiced my emergency dismount for the first time in a while!) I had a totally amazing ride on Tuesday. I finally got the concept of tightening my core in the sitting trot to avoid bracing and arching my back (which hurts!) and when I did that Radar totally started to move out. His trot totally changed for the better (ha! Wicked reference, couldn't help myself) but was still relatively easy to sit. I had such a fun lesson and I can't wait to see how it translates to my lesson on Friday.

This ride really got across the point to me that I need to do some cross-training of some kind. Am going to investigate splurging on a Wii Fit, since I've wanted one for a while and am not really pleased with my local pilates/yoga options.

Spiraling

In my Tuesday lesson Mia had me working on a new spiraling exercise at the trot. The geometry of it was slightly confusing to me at first, but it was basically ride a circle and work on getting true bend and the moment I felt Radar releasing and relaxing I immediately rode him out of the circle on a straight line as a reward. This exercise really made his trot so much more animated than usual. During our canter work Mia had me visualizing my downward canter transitions as creating two levels of trot: one trot that brings him down into the trot from the canter, the other trot that organizes it and gets him moving nicely again. That really helped, and we had some good canters by the end.

and when you ride your circle like a square...

it's actually more successful! In my lesson on Friday we ended up working on canter circles tracking left, which are really difficult on Radar since he's fairly resistant to bending and truly yielding that direction. It was actually really a matter of taking what I've been doing really successfully at the trot and trying to make it work at the canter, too. We had varying degrees of success with the canter circle, but got excellent trot work so it wasn't all that bad. And even when Radar wasn't doing it "right" (yield? bend? why the hell should I do that when I can plow to the right!) he was comfortable and happy with his job. Not a bad ride at all, I think. Just waiting for the canter breakthrough to happen for us...