Lessons

I've been taking lessons for a few months now.  I mentioned it in an earlier blogs.  I've decided to change trainers for my lessons.  The end result with both methods will be the same-having a horse that collects while walking, trotting, or cantering.  The new trainer breaks things down in sections, things that I can work on, get a handle on it, and progress to the next step.  The previous trainer had me doing alot of things at once.  Zoe and I seem to learn better in smaller steps.  So today we worked on getting her hind legs underneath her and getting her off her front end- and in order for that to happen we needed to do an extended and somewhat collected trot.  Her hind foot fall wasn't even meeting up with her front foot fall, we needed the hind to reach farther.  So we did it and exceeded it, but it was alot of work on both Zoe and my part.  But once she "got it" she was light on the front end and was really moving out.  It reminded me of riding her mother-Skippy.  Skippy has an awesome extended trot only she does it with her nose up in the air.  The trainer said that in order to gain the hind end under her and to get her off the front end I might lose some of the collection-but that was okay for now.  As long as we get her moving the way we want we can always work on the position of the head.  But today we did it collected, the head wasn't in the perfect position but we can work on that later.