A chilled Filly

Thursday 7 August 2014

The Box Exercise

As Filly is away I've been doing a fair bit of riding on Bonitao. I've spent a lot of time recently getting him really light with forequarter yields or direct rein. He will react to just a weight shift now most of the time. If that fails then just moving my outside leg forwards a little will get those front legs crossing over nicely.
At the same time I've been balancing this with getting the indirect rein lighter. This is asking the hind legs to cross over. He'll do this mostly from just my inside leg going back a touch, but occasionally still needs to be reminded with the rein.

For both of these I'm not talking about Level 2 Parelli type of feel, we are going way beyond that. I'm trying to see how light I can get the aids to be without them becoming over reactive. What I mean by this is that with my intention turned off I should be able to squirm around in the saddle, look at the view and have Bonitao not react to those feelings. I only want him to react when my intention (martial arts "ki" if you like) is turned on. To achieve this I've also being doing lots of "friendly" game in the saddle and on the ground both stationary and in motion. I also try to be very clear as to when my ki is on or off.
I don't think ki is a mystical thing by the way. But using it as a model in my mind effects the tension and intention in my body. It changes the activation of muscle groups causing my core to engage or relax. But we are straying of into martial arts training here.

Having got these basic yields very light I now wanted to get transitions much lighter. Not the traditional ones of walk, trot, canter, halt but ones between forwards, sideways and backwards.
I look to many sources to get inspiration for training sessions and so I came across this on YouTube Box Exercise . This was exactly what I was looking for, but how to make it as clear as possible to Bonitao ? Bruce does a great demo of the exercise in the video, but I want to do it from the ground first.

I like to teach a new pattern on the ground first if possible. I needed to make the pattern obvious to me which will help my focus and convey the pattern to Bonitao. Well the obvious solution was to place 4 poles on the ground in a box and move Bonitao around the outside of them with his nose always pointing in the same direction, say south. So we walk forwards along one side until his hind feet are just past the sideways pole. Move sideways right along that pole with his hind legs just in front of pole. Backwards down the other side then sideways with front legs just behind the other side pole. Simple.

Bonitao has done a lot of sideways with poles so I thought this would be pretty easy on the ground. Unfortunately it turned out he had only really done sideways with the pole under his belly or in front of his front legs. Rarely with the pole behind his hind legs and it worried him. This was the first problem to overcome. So we did a session of just going sideways in front of a pole, using the end of the pole as a place of rest. This is a bit like doing the point to point pattern to get impulsion except the impulsion was sideways and the points were each end of the pole. The ends of the pole were a destination, if you like, where he knows he will get a rest.
I also discovered that he was great going to his right, but going to his left was harder. In fact he would try hard to avoid going along the pole to his left at all, but was ok going left sideways when away from the pole. Approach and retreat to get over this problem by not asking him to go sideways with the pole too close behind to start with.

Once this pattern had become acceptable on the ground I tried it ridden. Backwards was good, but we had trouble transitioning from backwards to sideways. He wanted to keep going backwards. This was overcome with putting a long pause between the directions. Sideways to forwards was pretty good as was forwards to sideways. But we still have trouble with sideways to the left with the pole behind the legs.

All of this is very much work in progress, but the video gives me a vision of where I want to get to and now all I have to do is separate out the elements, get them good on their own and then recombine them into one beautiful flowing movement.

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