ANYWAY! Back to the subject in hand...
I recently (well about 3 months ago) took on an 11 year old, 17.1hh ex racehorse for reschooling. His name is Cordilla, Elliott to me and you!
When I first took him on, he had a serious lack of muscle. An example of this is the very bad atrophy on his back due to awful fitting racing saddles. He had no topline whatsoever to put it bluntly, and he had a point at the top of his bum!The picture below shows the lack of topline.
I found him to be a very quick learner from the start, managing to trot two 20m circles soft and round by the second week! Although he was very one sided and really struggled to bend on the right rein. (this is understandable due to the lack of muscle) He soon became more and more flexible and supple so I was able to lengthen his outline, and get him stepping through more.
After the 6 week mark, Elliott started to want to stretch and take the contact forward and down more toward the end of each session. I obviously allowed this as it builds up the back muscles due to the horse stretching down but still working from behind.
We soon started working on the canter transistions. Just like a typical thoroughbred, Elliott liked to run into canter, not always striking off on the correct leg. Suprisingly enough, he quickly learned that he had to jump into his canter, although he took this a bit too seriously at times!
Once the transitions to canter were becoming more consistent, we started to work on the canter itself. Obviously Elliott struggled to find his balance when going into the corners in canter, so I avoided the corners until I felt he was balanced enough on a 20m circle in the middle of the school. Once he was balanced, I started to gently ask him to soften, again he found this simple enough, and was soon cantering on a 20m circle, soft and round, and (almost) in a rhythm!
If you bring my yabbering forward to just before we had this annoying snowy weather, (about a month back) there have been some small improvements, but Elliott seems to be leveling out and learning things much slower (obviously because they are harder).
List of things we can do!
- Leg yield (better on the right rein than the left!)
- Full circuit of canter inc. corners
- Long and low at the start
- To cut it short, we can do a slighty shabby version of prelim 12!
All in all, I thought I'd bring you all up to date with how we're getting on, so I can continue updating you more regularly from now on!
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