Yesterday we had our second lesson of the year. Originally I was hoping for a jump lesson, but due to the Arctic conditions recently Scottie hasn’t done a huge amount and the school was slightly frozen, so I decided to do some polework for our lesson instead.
When I first got on he was very fresh and took a major dislike to the pile of poles I had put out off the track in the school. He took a lot of convincing to even walk past them during our warm up and he put in some really silly spooks scaring himself walking past them. Because of this, I didn’t have high hopes for him actually getting over any of these poles in a productive way!
However, once my lovely instructor put the first pole out for us to walk over, I was surprised that there was virtually no hesitation from Scottie at all. We came back round in trot and he didn’t bat an eyelid at the pole he had been spooking past moments before!
We spent virtually our entire lesson in trot focusing on getting Scottie to pick up through his back and stay rounded over the poles. While he was trotting through 7 poles happily, his go to reaction is to hollow over them rather than round and work over them properly.
But towards the end of the lesson he was starting to get it and he was dropping into an outline and really lifting his back over at least a few of the poles. He really felt amazing towards the end! He also started to get a bit over confident and thought it might be better/easier/more fun to canter through the poles (which were luckily spaced so that I could let him do this and then correct next time round.)
I’m really pleased with how this session went and I’m feeling a lot more confident about how easily Scottie will come back to jumping after this!
Last Updated on 14/01/2022
