Begin responsive is vital

­­­The ride I had yesterday was wonderful. My mother came to the barn with me and gave me a lesson since I really want to work on my flatwork/dressage. Smokey is a lot more experienced with dressage than me because his owner, Crystal, comes from a dressage background and is doing first level with him. I may know my letters off the back of my hands, but some things really need work. For example, apparently a twenty meter circle at E or B means you have to make X your center, not a point on the circle (silly me).

Anyway, we began our warm up with a marching walk around the arena with extremely light contact (almost loose). I really had to remind myself not to thrust with my pelvis to get Smokey moving, which seems to be my “go-to” when he’s not moving forward enough. During that time I really worked on pushing him into the corners, almost leg-yielding into them to supple him up.

Once we picked up trot, we kept up a shoulder-fore all the way around the arena, cut up with many circles. An exercise we did was almost a figure eight, but not quite. We would do a 20 meter circle in the corner of the arena and then come down the short diagonal (example: H to B) and creating another 20 meter in the opposite diagonal right before hitting the rail. I always have to keep Smokey’s brain in mind – if I get too repetitive, he doesn’t necessarily get bored, but does try to complete the movement/action before I ask him too.

The last movement we did before we tried a “mock” dressage test was trotting on a twenty meter circle and coming down to a walk, leg-yielding inward, and picking up the trot again, slowly decreasing the size of the circle but maintaining the rhythm. When it got to the point where his movement would get stuck, I would leg-yield Smokey back out and pick up the canter. We really got this exercise well, and he always moved away from my leg at the lightest touch.

 Unfortunately, I had trouble grasping this idea, so my mother set up four buckets around a circle and we tried a similar exercise. I would trot around the buckets, leg-yield in so I would then be on the inside of the buckets, and then leg-yield out. I understood this a lot better (I’m a visual person), but still had a little trouble leg-yielding in on the circle. In fact, we ended up doing a little bit of half pass!

As I said a little earlier we ended the lesson with a mock test. Smokey seemed a little tired, but he still went along with everything without getting upset. I won’t go into details about the test (it followed Training Level Test 1 and 2 closely), but the only complaints my mother had to make (she isn’t a judge, but she scribes every year at the different shows) were that I had to push Smokey into the corners more, and sometimes needed to be a bit more forward. I was very happy with the outcome of my ride. While his ground manners may be atrocious, Smokey is always perfectly behaved when I ride him!