Schooling Motivation

As you will know if you read my blogs regularly I am setting monthly aims at the moment to give me some motivation.  These are also helping me track our progress - which is definitely a good thing too.  So over the last month we have been doing some new exercises in the school.  Trying to keep my interest but also keep things a bit varied for Basil, which he seems to like.  He is still sometimes a bit jumpy when we first go into the arena so we tend to walk around and do circles until he calms down on those days (asking more makes him more jumpy and stressed!) 

 Looking very uninterested for our lunging session!

Since my last blog about 'Does schooling have to be boring?' back on the 19th February I have been trying the exercises below - with varying degrees of success!

Again, please excuse the drawings! 

The 10m half circle exercise we manage to do in walk but really struggle in trot, Basil is not really balanced enough yet and tends to go a bit fast - but we will get there.

This is one of our successful exercises in both walk and trot, Basil has really grasped this and performs it really nicely.  Next stage is leg yield away from the track! 

This is another exercise we are managing to do well in walk, we gradually reduce the size of the circle before leg yielding back out again onto a larger circle!  Trot is something which will take time as we improve our balance and steady our trot more.

I have had to alter this exercise because our trot to walk transitions are still not quick enough.  We just about manage to trot the long sides and walk the short sides although this is not always very accurate too for the downwards transition!  We will continue practising until we can do this exercise as it is above!

I do feel we are making progress but am wondering if I need to change Basil's bit to something a little stronger.  However, I really want to try to improve our downwards transitions with half halts and my seat and balance if I can!  He is more responsive to this on hacks so I am sure that with time this will transfer to the school too.

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Until next time!

Jo