Training Week with Bent Branderup, day 5

Friday, March 29 2013

Today I felt the results of the 'work on the borders' we did yesterday, both my horses and myself were tired.  With Aranka, I combined all the things we learned over the last week, but with less result then yesterday. Lesson learned: If the horse does not recover in the 23 hours after the last training, then that training was simply a bit too much. We'll take the weekend at home off to recover, and start fresh again on monday. I am very proud of Aranka and her performance during this week. She is getting better and better still!

With Fitzer, we used some canter to energize his walk and trot. We worked on transitions from piaffe to canter and back into piaffe, which improved his rythm and gave him a lighter shoulder in walk and trot. We had a nice uphill transition from school walk into canter which felt amazing!

The challenge with Fitzer is to keep him listening to my aids, especially in directing his shoulders. When he gets tired and/or distracted, he does not follow the indirect rein as good and when that happens, I can no longer place his shoulders exactly in front of his hips and we lose the lightness. So part of our homework is to improve his obedience and focus on the aids, moving his physical and mental limits so that he remains collected and focussed longer and longer and keeps listening to my aids.  Bent told me before we left, that Fitzer is a horse that can take me quite far in the Academic Art of Riding, so that was a great end to our week and a huge motivation to keep practicing!

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