20th February 2019

After last week’s riding lesson on Bella I felt pretty confident today in trying out some of the things we learned. I let my friend Katie get on first to warm her up, as both myself and Bella’s owner have a bad left side, whereas Katie had a strong left side, and so I wanted her to help counter that.

Watching Katie it was clear that Bella is simply a very difficult horse to ride. She really resists in working over her back as she has not yet developed the muscles in her neck needed for that kind of work, and it is pretty hard bless her! However Bella really did try her best which you could clearly see happening, as although it was not consistent, there were many fleeting moments where her body position would be perfect and she was working over the back nicely.

When doing canter work Katie tried ‘going through the gears’ like Ben Hobday did at his clinic, just to see how she would react. The reaction was: gallop! As Bella flung herself as fast as she could down the long side of the arena, when it came to collecting her again in the corner it took a long time for Bella to slow down, as it appears that in the past whoever has trained her made sure she was nice and forward, however this now means that whenever you put your leg on she goes even faster. This was the case when working on circles to try and get a little inside bend, by asking her to work over her back we did halt halts in the outside rein, opened up the inside rein, and then squeezed with the inside leg. However, it often happened that as soon as you put on the inside leg Bella would pounce into a trot, and so is not clear on what we were asking of her.

Furthermore her canter was super unbalanced, as she tended to just run around the arena not really knowing what she was doing. It took a while for Katie to balance her canter a little by lengthening and shortening the stride and working on a circle. However it was clear she also needs a lot of practice in the canter too.

By the time I got on Katie has worked Bella so hard she was super sweaty! And so when I came to try and ask for a little bend I found that she was listening, and her back end was really powerful which is good, however she wasn’t fully capable to lower her head and neck. I also found that she began doing her bad habit again by trying to snatch at the reins which made her lose concentration slightly in what I was asking her to do. However I found that by rewarding her with a long rein letting her neck stretch she was very grateful for that!

Katie also put me through my paces in terms of my position, turns out that my left leg sticks out away from the saddle instead of pointing forwards. From this I did some of the exercises that I learned last week in order to get my leg in the correct position, Katie also tied my stirrup to my girth to further implement this. However I found that this was very difficult to practice on a horse like Bella as all of your attention has to be on her, so to focus on my position as well as her proved to be a little mind boggling as I felt so alienated in the saddle!

It was clear today that because Bella is so young that she needs regular schooling pretty much every day in order to learn and develop as a horse. The only frustrating thing is though that I live a 2 hours bus commute away from her whilst at university, so I only can ride her one day a week. I don’t think she is schooled very often by her owner either, so I know that the only way I’m going to make progress with her is over the summer when I am home and can ride her more frequently. It’s just a matter of waiting and fixing my position and bad habits until then!