My name is Kelsey, and I am an aspiring Region 6 Young Rider. My horse is a 12 year old OTTB (Off the Track Thoroughbred) named Montague. Monty and I first came together when I was 12 years old and he was 4, and we have been partners ever since.
Early Morning Clinic
Hello, everyone! I am starting this blog in order to catalog my experiences as I go through Young Riders, and today is my first blog entry! Enjoy. :)
So, today was the first day of the Rebecca Rigdon clinic and it started out bright and early and COLD. All the horses were happy that the sun was out, but the temperature definitely hadn’t gone up since last night!
Monty and I had the second ride of the day at 8:45, and my warm up was super. Monty came out and was very relaxed and loose despite the cold weather and distractions that were going on, and I couldn’t have been happier with how responsive and light he was!
Our goal for today’s lesson was to work on the tempi changes and the pirouettes since that will be our biggest weakness going into the summer. I have only loosely played with the pirouette work on Monty and we have done a few lines of changes but that is about the extent of our work on those movements! Rebecca started out by giving us a pattern on going across the diagonal and doing a change on the first quarter line, and immediately a volte to your new direction, and then proceeding on the diagonal and another change on the opposite quarter line with another 10 meter circle. And guess what? It worked like a charm!
The best tip of the day, however, was in regards to the canter stride. Rebecca wanted me to “canter on the spot” and almost think of pounding the ground with his hind legs in order to get him underneath me and really up in front. This gave me the most amazing feeling on Monty and made the work in the changes much easier.
We moved onto working on a line of 4 tempis, and really, the most important thing for me is to learn how to count. Counting the tempis are definitely harder the more I think about - if I just let Monty go and trust that he will respond in the tempis, it gives me time to count and him time to react!
The pirouette work came next. The exercise that we did for this involved making a triangle with the short side of the arena and X. In order to do this sequence, Rebecca had me keep Monty’s haunches in along all the lines. In the two corners we would do quarter pirouettes and at the apex, on X, we did a half pirouette. Monty struggled to keep the forward momentum in the pirouettes and I struggled in getting him to shift his shoulder over quicker in order to make the pirouette smaller. In order to really get me to bring his shoulders over, Rebecca said to almost think of “neck reining” him over in the pirouette. This made all the difference for me and once I used that image to turn him, our pirouettes improved ten fold.
We ended with just a little bit of trot work and half-passes. Monty was super, although pretty tired by the end! Tomorrow we will build off of what we worked on today and maybe take a nice light hack around the property to keep him fresh and ready to go.
And here is a helpful video by Edward Gal that places a lot of focus on half-pass and pirouette exercises: http://www.horseandcountry.tv/episode/edward-gal-masterclass
Tip of the day: To get the jump in the canter that you need, think of your horse bounding underneath you and “pounding the ground” with his hind legs like on a trampoline.
