Sunday 18th January

Today I spoke to Eddy about the problems I had with Smarty and also showed him the video we had made of him. His thoughts were that Smarty as learnt that he can just push through pressure by doing this and this is what he thinks he is doing. So he advised doing clover leaf patterns, questions box and point to point to really get Smarty focused on me and be more balanced turning left and right and also when I want him to do it.

So today I started with Smarty as I knew Eddy would be more likely to be around as he had horsemanship lessons, so if the problem started again Eddy would be able to see it and also help me. But as I was grooming Smarty I decided to do a little ET on his saddle area and girth area before I saddled to loosen his back before we done anything. But from doing this I really got the feeling that he was quite sore as I was really getting big moves and ripples through his body from one move. So I decided today it maybe wasn’t a good idea to play with him or ride him just incase he is really sore. So instead I done a full body balance on him, so he will also have tomorrow off and we will see then if there is an improvement.

Today with Blossom we started with playing with stick to me and then moved on to working on our back up, which was much better today. We then moved on to playing with circles and today again I was quite firm with her about where she was looking and used moving her sideways to help me get her looking in on the circle.

I then put the bareback pad on her and mounted and we started with ride the rail in walk, but today Blossom just didn’t seem settled. There was a lot of horses in the arena and everyone was doing there own thing and sometimes other horses just got a little too close to Blossom for her liking so I think this could have been the problem. So I decided there was no point fighting her and pushing her as I knew I would just make things worse, so finished for the day.

So as I had finished early I done a ET session on Marieke’s pony benji as she has been at me for weeks to do it one him. I then watched a little of Eddy playing with the new horse he has in to start, nothing to exciting today as the horse responded well to the seven games so it was nice to see that.