OK, Let Me Try Again

I want to try to explain the leg/shoulder connection that I felt yesterday, and felt again and explored further this afternoon. I took the horses down to the arena again. I taught a lesson on Keno to my beginner student. She did a great job and made some big steps in her progress. Flyboy hung out until it was his turn. I spent quite a while warming him up at the walk, asking for bend, softness, and relaxation. It was a good exercise because a cowboy came down with three horses and set up a round pen; he was banging panels around and making a real racket. Fly and I had to just concentrate on what we were doing and not worry about the noise, his dog, the colt he was pushing around the round pen.

I settled down to doing lots of serpentines--changing directions often and using my inside leg/seat bone to effect the rein change. Eventually I found that I was using my outside leg to support his outside shoulder to keep him in the turn. (I was actually using the inside of my thigh on his shoulder.) This kept the turns smooth, round and very nice. My outside lower leg was not really involved. (I don't know if this description helps, but "the feel" of what was happening was a lightbulb for me. Maybe you had to be there!) Fly is totally seat/leg sensitive and willingly does circles, figure eights, tiny serpentines, etc. completely off seat and leg aids. Wow. This is the same horse that four months ago didn't move off my leg at all! Go back and read some early posts and you will be able to see how far he has come! He did lots of stretching down and blew several times, too.

Trailering was again easy and smooth. I played with the banner again, too, but only for a few minutes--we'll work on that some more next week. These blog posts may sound a bit repetitive, but bringing a horse along is repetitive. We do lots of the same types of things. I try to mix it up (which is easier in the summer!) but all this basic schooling will pay off in the end, I hope!
Once again I forgot to take pics. Sigh. I should have asked the cowboy to snap a few!