Tuesday Fluidity I Day Seven

This morning started with Remuda with Jesse where we visited horses in their pens and observed their mane switches and their rib tendencies. It still blows me away that a switch can be improved or even reversed by simply massaging the mirror point on the spine - fantastic!

It was then straight into a demonstration by Jon about Bridleless Riding and Perfect Practice Makes Perfect. In reality I believe these to be the same thing, i.e. you cannot perform bridleless riding having not first practiced perfect communication.

So the demonstration started with the overview of the prerequisites for saddling and then for mounting, with an emphasis on perfect practice - so there is no compromise in the horse's confidence, sensitivity and communication. It is important to ensure the saddle is a positive in your horse's mind and that you do not mount until a learning frame of mind (i.e. being a partner attitude) is achieved. Remember everything we do means something.

As soon as you mount the following should occur; hurry up and relax, then test the lateral flexion, indirect rein and direct rein responses. If all is working as it should you can start to move around and practice these at gaits - trying not to use the reins of the hackamore as you are practicing perfect for bridleless! Remember before the rein comes into play there are 3 phases to go through first; eyes, belly button and leg.

When this is going well, you can go to one rein and one carrot stick and use the carrot stick to drive/porcupine as your phase 4, but still have the rein in case of emergency. When this is going well, you can go to two carrot sticks, but keep a rein attached in case of an emergency. If you are at the stage where you rarely go to phase 4 (a carrot stick) for your moves then you can try just a string around the neck and finally nothing!

Remember if you are having to use the carrot sticks too much or the backup rein you need to retreat a step or two and fix things.

For bareback riding it is useful to use the bareback pad before going all the way - this give you a safer seat until your balance is really good. It is also worth using the hackamore at first in case you need the reins for balance, so you do not hang on your horse's mouth.

I did not try either bridleless nor bareback today as I do not think Roget and I are quite up to that yet (with only one short ride under our belts!). So we went back to our saddling issue and tried again. We started off using the same tactics as yesterday, quite why I thought tactics that didn't work yesterday would work today I have no idea! This led me to formulate a new strategy - reverse psychology - you see Roget was saying he didn't like the saddle so I needed to convince him that the saddle was the best thing for him. How did I do this? Easy - we played the circling game at canter and gallop and the only place I would let him rest was by the saddle. He very quickly recognised the rest spot and offered to stop there. After a couple more offered stops, he put his nose on the saddle and that gave me the permission I needed to put the saddle on with Roget standing perfectly still. That's 1:0 to me!

After the saddling everything went well, we practiced all our rein communications, that the whoa and go all worked and then had our own little hack around the Savvy Park, various obstacles and the Playground, with lots of grazing and rests in between. We had an absolute ball! I believe tomorrow is Trail Riding, so hopefully we will be able to join in and leave the ranch for a little countryside experience.........