Riding Lessons
I’ve been enjoying the course on planning and goal setting by Hippologic. She asked us to think about a short term goal and a long term goal. I decided to work on the Spanish walk as my short term, and am already seeing some improvement. For long term I stuck with the goal I had from the beginning, even before Rusty came along, I wanted a good cutting horse.
Right now I am not even trying to ride Rusty, there is simply not enough child free time. Ground work I can do with children running underfoot. O have put some thought into how I can train Rusty to target a flag/ cutting dummie but have mostly put it to the back burner. Having to write it down as a goal and list things we can work on on our path to that goal forced me to really think about how to reach it. Kind of the point of the exercise 😉
Things that we need to work on to achieve the goal (listed on the Goal page I added, at the top by the title or here if you are interested) were easy and interesting, to me at least. Most of the things on the list involved ground work. So we got started. If he is going to work properly he needs to turn beautifully on his hindquarters. We had worked on this in the past but hadn’t touched it for a very long time. He had nearly forgotten completely. Once the move is perfected I want to move the cue to one I can give standing in front of him. Then he can learn to target me, or as my husband mentioned, a cutting dummie would be a better idea. I realize that completely but am somewhat lacking in one. He offered to build it for me!
All in all we had a great lesson starting, again, on turns on the hindquarters. We worked on following a target to start getting him away from me to lunge, kind of. Plus it is a start for our cattle work. Then we did a quick once over of Spanish walk and bowing. It was a 15 or so minute lesson in the 15 or so degree weather and i was ready to go in and get warmed up by the time we were done!