Sunday 25th January

Today I wasn’t feeling so good, my neck and back is starting to get really sore and is also giving me headaches so today I wasn’t really feeling up to a big play session.

So this afternoon me and Corine were going to watch some videos of an Parelli course Eddy attended as a student with an Australian instructor, but we couldn’t get the sound to work on it very well so we couldn’t really hear much. So instead we watched the Karen Rolf dvd instead.

I felt I should really do something with the ponies, so to make things easy for me I decided to play with them both at the same time. It went ok online, we managed to do some nice circles and yo yo game but that was about it. Smarty really wasn’t sure about what I wanted and got worried sometimes, so I thought it would be easier to ride Smarty and lead Blossom.

This went very well, I had to work quite hard at the start to get them both focused on my energy as I hadn’t done as much as normal with them online first. But they soon settled and were very good. Today I did work them hard, with lots of trot work as I have felt the last few days they have had a lot of energy especially Smarty! What I noticed was that at the start of the session he had his body bent the wrong way and was leaning on me when I would ask him to turn. But nearer the end of the session he was much softer and relaxed and overall much nicer to ride. So I think I maybe need to give him harder work (well lots of trot) when I first start my ridden session to let him get out all his extra energy before I actually start asking him to do anything more challenging as this is where he then starts fighting me. So it might be interesting to see if this theory works, I will try it the next time I ride him..