It seems that the progress I made as I described in my last post was true progress indeed, as it remained with both myself and Becky in our lesson this past Sunday.
The weather turned pretty atrocious as soon as I mounted, and it pushed us to work mostly in the round yard, which is a tall enclosure and hence provided protection for Becky (though not so much for me!) from the driving wind and rain.
In this lesson we refined the circle work even more, by trying to make circles smaller whenever Becky’s attention to me and to the rein started to wander too much. Smaller circles required Becky to slow down her pace and be much more accurate with foot placement (and, hence, more focused on the job at hand, rather than at what was going on around her) and allowed me to be more aware of her inaccuracies. A little crabbing sideways on a big circle, which requires only a small bend in her body can easily be missed by an inexperienced rider (like me), but the same crabbing on a smaller circle – and it becomes very obvious, and hence can be caught and corrected that much easier.
This is where the improvements with rein responsiveness really showed up. I could now correct her shoulder from falling in or out of the circle, by slight and periodic pressure on the rein, which didn’t interfere with her forward movement. Previously, when she was still leaning and resisting the rein, any correction would’ve resulted in a rein-tugging contest between us which would’ve encouraged her to stop, straighten up her body and lose her place in the circle; and hence the consistency of what I was asking her to do, which was to walk a circle as accurately as possible, would’ve also been lost.
The overall improvement in her responsiveness to the rein after working on the smaller circle was dramatic. By the end of the lesson she almost did not fall in with her shoulder at all going to the left, which, as I described in previous post, was one of the main symptoms of her not fully responding to the left rain and resisting the left bend.
Another sign of success was Becky offering to relax and lower her head even while on rein contact, which indicated that listening and responding to the rein to the degree that I was requiring of her, and to maintain the bend in her body was actually OK in her world. She was getting more and more happy with the idea, which is really the best result one could have when asking a horse to do something – that the horse feels happy and comfortable doing it.
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