flying lead changes
Friday thru Monday Happiness
Just singing my happiness living my life with horses.
Friday was wonderful. Powder came home from her 30 days of training with Tony and Jennifer Vaught. It was good to have her back in the pasture again. Powder and Velvet had never met. Powder didn’t move fast enough to suit Velvet, so Powder lost some hair. She’s very aware of Velvet now.
Friday was lesson night. I have my winter goals for with Nova.
- We are to trail walk with head down until she is really relaxed. You remember that picture of the Indian sitting on his paint horse. The horse has his head down and it’s titled The End of the Trail. That’s the general idea except we are to do it at a slow walk.
- We are to always work on flying lead changes and just regular lead changes
- We are to work on our reining horse spins
- We are to do a real trot where I have to post. Nova’s fox trot is now so developed that I have a difficult time getting her to do a square two beat trot
- We are to do collected canter departs which is the opposite of strung out canter departs.
I was going to talk about riding both Velvet and Nova out on the trail on Sunday. That was heaven!
I was going to talk about taking Powder to Pine Dell this Monday night and playing with her. I was blown away by her liberty trotting task and how she maintains the gait. There was no squirty speeding up, no tails up snorting. She just trotted around the round pen. We went places in the dark, thru a narrow barn door, crossing a bridge while looking for the round pen light. We started out in the big arena with two horses cantering around us.
Powder was as calm as could be. I love this horse!
I love them all!!
I was going to go on and on, but Pawn Shop Stars is ready to start. I must watch that show!
Velvet – Flying Lead Changes
This is a post from the woman (me) who had given up on FLC as Velvet would never do them consistently…in 5 years.
This is a post from the woman (me) who was shocked to discover that Velvet had passed the L2 Flying Change Lead task the other day while in a group lesson.
Here’s a another shocker: I decided to work on the L3 task…counter
canter. You must canter once around an arena or area in a counter canter.
Velvet has been making great improvement in her ability to counter canter.
Last year we were a ruderless ship while going around a corner at the counter canter, inspiring a lot of quiet screams from the passenger (me).
SO…I tell her to counter canter and as we go around a corner, she does a
flying lead change. Huh? I say. Then we did a figure 8 to try and get back
into the counter-canter mode again. Nope, we did a flying lead change in the
middle. Huh? sez I.
I will set this up so that she can’t do a flying lead change. On the next figure 8 trip into the middle, I told her to go diagonally through the center. There was none of that come through the middle looking the way you’re going and then changing your focus. Nope, we just went on a nice diagonal through the middle with my focus straight ahead.
Yep…as soon as she figured it out that we were going a different direction …flying lead change!
GOOD GAD!!!! She’s become a gaited reining horse!
I leaped out of the saddle, ripped the saddle off her back and took her to
the treat place in the barn. Velvet and I have tried for 5 years to do flying
lead changes! She was rewarded greatly for her effort that night.
Counter canter will come later!