Dressage Update

Hey!
Since my last post we took a day off then spent today working on our dressage which I can happily say is steadily improving. Actually, some HUGE leaps forward with only a few steps back. He carries himself very well in a forward working walk with his back feet stepping into his tracks if not stepping over them by an inch or sometimes more. I can move his shoulders apart from his neck with that apart from his hind quarters and then put them all back together to have a nice nose to tail bend. At the trot he is fairly consistent with traking up and maintaining the pace that I want. He is also giving to the bridle a lot more and allowing me to do what I want with his body which is good. Our work at the canter is still very.... um.... exciting. He will occasionally 'get it' and be soft/track up/ect but the rest of the time, you would think he has 5 legs. My dressage trainer got on him to work out his canter after I just couldn't make any headway with it. She told me later that she thought his canter was the strangest ever trying to work on a 20 meter circle. He just recently figured out how to canter anything but a straight line or wide turn without getting super unbalanced. I've figured out that figure-8s are the best way to remind him what he needs to do at any gait without risking a fight. I've tried to use them before but I didn't ride them correctly to get the reaction that I wanted.

So we're working and learning and poking around this new type of training with some success. We're going to start seriously working on the counter canter, trot lengthening, side passes and 10 meter circles once we get more consistency with his basic gaits. We've played around with these movements but mostly just adding them in when Jazz was having a good day, not walking in the arena with the intent to work on them. So far the counter canter is proving to be the mostly difficult for him to understand but after 7 years of people trying to drill auto-changes into his head when going across a diagonal or through a turn so I'm not surprised. He'll get it eventually with some more correct muscling, added impulsion, better balance and more schooling.

We'll get there sometime!!