Tuesday 30th December

Today I started with Blossom, and we started with working on our sideways as I found yesterday when I tried to play this game at liberty it didn’t work. But I found out that is because I do still rely on the rope to stop her and to prevent her being too far away from me - so no wonder it doesn’t work at liberty!! So today I really worked on getting sideways really soft and worked on trying not to use the rope to stop her. This actually went really well and I will work more on this over the next few days before I try it at liberty again, otherwise I am just setting myself up to fail at liberty.
I then played with sideways over a pole and this was better today, still needs a lot of improvement and she is still not 100% confident with the pole under her.

We then played with yo yo game and today her back up was really good and straight, so I decided to test ourselves and asked her to trailer load backwards from 22ft away. The first attempt she lost her confidence when she got to the bottom of the ramp of the trailer, so we played around with approach and retreat until she was able to back straight to the bottom of the ramp. I then asked her into the trailer and she managed this fine, so I then combined it all together again and got her to back into the trailer from 22ft away and she done it really well.

We then went into the round pen to work on change of direction, we started with just walk to get the hang of the pattern again today. It was very interesting as I found I sometimes forget to walk backwards until she is already coming to me.. I tend to rely on the rope and the stick to get her to draw, when I should be walking backwards to encourage the draw and using the rope and CS to back this up. How interesting!! So I really worked on myself today and after playing around for over half and hour we were starting to get some really nice changes - so we are getting there!!

I then mounted bareback and had a little ride round and she was really good today and stayed calm and relaxed the whole time even in trot, so I kept our riding session short seen as she was so good!

Today with Smarty I decided to play the seven games and find any holes we have so we can fix them now instead of waiting until there is a big problem.
Friendly is getting much better and he is now becoming much more confident with this and is starting to accept the string around his hind legs, which was a real issue for him to start with. So I think he is now ready for some new friendly games.
Porcupine was really good.
Driving game was good, except driving the FQ in his right eye.. He tends to go backwards, sideways and forwards to get away. So today I played lots of friendly to help him be more confident with the CS in this area and will continue to work with this slowly as I do think he is scared more than being dominant.
Yo yo game is really good - He goes backwards from phase one and his draw is really good too and he will even come to me in trot if I ask him.
Circling game today was ok it has been better.. But I think the problem is as he has been a show pony I think he has been lunged a lot and therefore still just runs in circles without thinking. So I will work on this with him to try and keep him more LB and his focus on me using exercises I have been using with Blossom.
Squeeze game was good today, I only asked him to go between me and the wall more just to see how the send and disengage was and he was really good. So I think I will start playing with this game more with other obstacles.
Sideways is our most challenging game - he really finds it difficult to relax.. He can move sideways well, but he is always trying to escape! So we need to do a lot more work on this!

So overall all the games are quite good but now I know what ones we still have a few problems with and what ones we can start to challenge ourselves more with.