A brilliant lesson!

[maggiestar]

Just wanted to share how excited and happy I am after today's lesson. Normally I always lose my stirrups in canter but today something just clicked and I managed to keep them! At the beginning of the lesson I put my lower legs to stay in the correct position and concentrated HARD on keeping them there plus heels down which seemed to work. The horse seemed to go forward more as a result which is great. I know it's a small thing but am so pleased! Anyone else had a good day? Feel free to share here

 

[Pippity]

Huzzah for brilliant lessons, and well done!

I've had a rather good day, too.

My favourite RDA horse had gone back to his owners, but he came back today! So I had a big cuddle, which he tolerated with very good grace. Then I stood by as support while one of the other volunteers had her first off-lead rein ride on him, and then I got on him myself. And I felt him go straight from 'must be very careful' to 'wahey!' as soon as I got on, which is nice that he thinks he can be less careful with me!

He was feeling very full of himself and raring to go, so I did a lot more canter work than I would normally, and I felt I'd really progressed by the end of it. (Though I suspect my trot-canter transitions would have been dreadful if I hadn't had to spend most of my time holding him back from cantering.) But I finally managed a consistent canter-walk transition, albeit with a lot of snorting and tail-bannering and pretending to be a Mighty Arab Stallion. And I also managed to get him to extend his trot without poinging into canter!

But, basically, he could have lobbed me off and it still would have been a brilliant ride, because my favourite pony's back!

 

[maggiestar]

Yay, brilliant! He's obviously very comfortable with you, what a lovely feeling!

 

[Natti]

You both sound like you had great times! Well done for not losing your stirrups, I used to have that problem with trotting for a while, it's amazing when it finally clicks!
Pippity - YAY pony back!! It's always great to see them again, and good work on the canter-walk transitions, they're pretty hard!

 

[maggiestar]

Thanks Natti, the stirrup loss was driving me mad so I decided to make a big effort today and finally cracked it. Fingers crossed for next week...