Grid Work Monday

Calvin is shedding sooo much which means, he's itchy! I took a video of him enjoying a good scratchy session. Look at his little lip twitch, so cute!

Calvin had Sunday off, so Monday meant hard work. I set up some poles to practice grid work. I first set up trot poles that looked like so:

Trotting poles has many benefits, horses need to use their "hoof-eye" coordination. They also use their legs differently, whether it's lifting up higher or reaching over the poles. Even better is that there is not the impact on the joints that happens when jumping. Pole work has not been found to have any more impact than regular trotting.

This was his first time doing poles and he did very well. There were a couple of times where he hit a pole and realized he had to pick up his feet, but once he figured that out it was smooth sailing. He and I found some holes in his training though, for example he doesn't know how to extend and collect his gaits very well (a fancy way of saying slow trot, medium trot, fast trot, slow canter, etc). So we'll be practicing this for a while! 

He's also stiff on his left side and stronger on his right. This was evidenced by him having more of a right bend while traveling which meant he bulged to the left. When he bulges to the left, my left knee almost gets taken out by the awful arena fencing. To fix this, we practiced lateral work:

Today was the first time I rode him and thought wow, he's starting to feel like a "made" horse. He's more balanced and responsive to my subtle cues. Don't get me wrong, he's still very young and we still have a long way to go. Yet I couldn't help but get on and think wow, if I didn't know any better I'd think he was a young warmblood!