which_chick | Horse is finally (mostly) shed out!

I've been dealing with shed season over here. Shedding is messy and annoying but a furry horse limits what I can do with him, especially when our stupid temperatures are in the high seventies... in mid-April. (Usually mid-April is fifties.) If he's covered in an inch of fur, he's going to be sweating standing still in those temps... and so he was.

However, with longer daylight hours and time, he's mostly done shedding. And happily temps are back below 65F, which means... work. Fitness work, really, as we start the season with fitness prior to pursuing our summer project of failure-at-flying-changes.

I got some winter directives from DLB for this stuff which I, erm, worked on some? They are as follows...

Squares.

Transitions through movements.

Adjustability within gait.

Shoulder-in on a circle.

For all of these exercises, I'm to spend some time focusing on him taking both reins all the time.

Have we worked squares? Some. Probably not enough. I hate squares.

Transitions through movements? Yes. Oddly this was hard until all of a sudden it wasn't. It was like... "Oh. OH. You want me to hold the shape AND do the transition. Got it." and then we were done with that insofar as entertainment. We still do it as part of our warm up and fitness work but it's not A Project anymore.

Adjustibility within gait? Lots. This is an endlessly polish-able turd and it's fun. Much work in the trot. Some in the walk. Not enough in the canter, tbh. I'll work on it.

Shoulder-in on a circle? Er. No?

Both reins all the time? Work in progress. Improving.

DLB returns May 19th. I reviewed these directives so that I can summarize my work on them for DLB. SOME of them have been worked on all along. Others... Okay, true confession time.

I am not certain if I am shoulder-inning on a circle. It's very confusing. I can't tell if we are Doing The Thing or if I'm doing some other useless broken-toy fuckery that is definitely not-the-thing. I feel like if you can't tell if your horse is doing what you want him to do, probably don't try to drill that just yet. So, I noodle around with it a little to see if I can improve my understanding. So far, bupkis. *sigh*

I can definitely tell if I'm shoulder-inning on the straight, with a rail or without. That's on point. I can definitely go shoulder-inning at the drop of a fucking hat... in a straight line. I can adjust the degree of shoulder-inning angle at will from "barely at all" to "almost 30 degrees off the line" and hold it steady anywhere in that range. My straight line shoulder-inning is pretty good to go and it's even getting sort of reasonable in canter. Works about half the time, depends on how many abs I've already burned up. (He does better when he's fresher.)

Shoulder-inning on a circle is not so obvious for me, though. Are we turning? How circle while shoulder-inned? What do? So confuse. Clearly I need to work on it some more.