Sunday 4th January

Today with Blossom I decided to work through the level 2 online assessment tasks and see if there was anything we couldn’t do or need to work on. We still need to work on sideways to get it just that little bit softer, but today was much better and she managed sideways over the pole in both directions without going forwards or backwards so this is a massive improvement.

My main problem today was getting Blossom to maintain gait… Would you believe I couldn’t get Blossom to stay in trot!!! So to work on getting her to maintain gait I had to bring her energy up a little, so we done some walk to canter transitions. But I think I maybe done just a little too much as she became very impulsive, so I had to then work on getting her to calm down again. But once we got the balance right, she was really good and we got some nice changes of direction and transitions.

All the other tasks went really well and there was no real problems with any of them, some couldn’t maybe just get a little better but I was still really happy with what we done.

I then saddled and we started with checking my lateral flexion and back up, all was good so we moved on to riding the rail of the arena. She was calm so we started doing some trot transitions and these went quite well, she was a little impulsive at times but relaxed again very quickly. We then played with the figure of eight pattern with circles either end and she was really good and was relaxed the whole time!! I was able to do the pattern without using my reins at all and just using the CS to guide her round the pattern when she needed it.

I then played with circling round a block, this went really well and I think it helped both me and Blossom to have a focus on what we are circling. Everything was going so well we even done some canter circles in both directions, canter wasn’t totally relaxed but on the other hand it wasn’t totally out of control either and when I asked her to slow she did. So I was really happy with this and will try and start doing more canter with her.

Today with Smarty I played lots of friendly games with the CS and the rope, he is now starting to relax so it is really nice to see the change in him.

I then played with stick to me with walk, stand and backup transitions - he was very good at sticking to me and was really connected to my energy but he found the back up really difficult. So we done a lot of work on this to get him good at this and really going backwards straight. I I then played with yo yo game from zone 3 to again help him with his back up and he was really good at this and whatever the problem was with his back up had gone.

I then saddled and we started with some CS riding and he was really good and very relaxed. We then moved on to playing with walk to canter transitions and he was really good at this and was totally calm the whole time. So I thought I would test ourselves and tried canter to halt transitions, and these worked quite well too. To start with he over shot my marker by maybe one stride, but I thought for our first time doing this he was brilliant!!

I then set up my own little pattern which involved a block and a barrel, set out the same as you would for a figure of eight pattern about 50ft apart. What we had to do was go to the block and then stop, then we went forward and around the barrel and back to the block to stop again. We started doing this in walk and he quickly worked out the pattern so we moved up to trot and very quickly we were cantering the pattern!! Even doing this is canter he stayed relaxed and stopped and relaxed at the block and let me play friendly games hanging off the side of him and touching the block. I was so happy with him today, he is just such a good pony and seems to love getting ridden!!!