This week we were back on our normal schedule, and although we only had about 1/2 of the arena finished off at home, that's where we met for the lesson.
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| He is so tired! |
I wanted to focus on refining what we worked on last lesson, and we got some AWESOME work. We also hit a pretty large block in our progress.
We started with just spiraling in on a 20 m circle one 'track' at a time. We wanted to focus on keeping his head, neck, and shoulders in line and having his hind leg start the step in. He is really starting to connect the dots and put this together well.
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| Here you can see the dips and hills. |
We then moved up into the trot and baby stepped it up until we were spiraling in a few tracks and out a few tracks within one circle. Doing this really unlocked Uno's back and he started offering some of the roundest and most uphill trot he has ever had. Super Trainer was helping me find the right tempo for him to hold this trot on his own. It was SUPER.
We then went for a walk break. In hindsight we should have either stopped or walked for another 10 minutes before picking him back up - the boy was TIRED!
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| It looks pretty flat here - this is a lie. |
When we did change directions it was clear that Uno did not want to play ball. He was back to running through his shoulders and throwing his head around at even in direct rein contact. We slowly finessed a bit more cooperation out of him and got one good 20 m trot circle and two straight steps in off my outside leg. Then we called it a day.
Basically what it boils down to is - my arena is not straight, flat, level, or even. It is a tilled up patch of dirt slightly wider and longer than a small dressage court. It has two corners that are MUCH lower than the rest of the arena. Because we just got it tilled up again the massive amount of rain last week had a bunch of rocks popping up. I only had one section cleared and it wasn't the flatest.
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| See the dip? |
Uno already finds the work very hard when he is not able to just pull along with his front end, trying to do that AND compensate for the hills is just too much for him to hold together for very long. Super trainer wants us to try and trailer off to an actual arena at least once a week. I have a field that is flatter (just soggy) that we can work on as well.
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| This is 5 minutes away. |
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| This is 20 minutes away. |
The good news is that he will get stronger. The bad news is that this is the arena we have. It will be a long time before I can clear another spot of the property to ride on. As you can see below - there is space in the lower pasture for an arena and it is flatter, buuut there are some HUGE trees that I do not know how we would take down.
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| Long skinny property is long and skinny. |
Great lesson! I love spiraling exercises for all the reasons you mention here. As for the arena... I find that working in "imperfect" settings at home makes it that much easier when you go off property for rides! Nothing worse than a horse who has only ever worked in a perfectly manicured arena and has no concept of watching his feet!
ReplyDeleteI don't think you need to build a new arena. You should be able to have a professional come in and laser level your current arena. They'll have to move the footing off and redistribute the base, but it should cost a lot less than building a new arena.
ReplyDeleteYou are MASSIVELY overestimating the arena we currently have. When we bought the place and had the first acre cleared, it was literally just the only flatish bit. It is just somewhere that has no grass that we till to keep from becoming concrete hard. There is no base or footing to speak of.
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