Yes those lines in the image are poles, it was the best I could work up after forgetting to take a picture of the actual poles. Although this is something I might try doing in the future with pole work posts, then add in a picture of the actual poles too. If it came up to a more complicated exercise to explain I will be able to add in arrows etc to show which way we went.
What we did with the poles:
Throughout a circle that took up half of the arena we set out 3 pairs of poles. One in the middle of the arena (orange), one by the entrance gate (blue) and the other in between them too (green).
The exercise was to then go through the poles and around In a circle or oval depending on which two sets of poles we were going through. In this lesson I hadn't done any work with Legacy since the lesson the week before so on the rare occasion she was a little lively (she can normally go awhile without work and be fine when you get back on.) this toyed with my confidence a little and I'm going to be honest there was a few times I was ready to throw the towel in and say I wanted to get off.
Thankfully I had put my big girl breeches on that day and I fought through it.
Before using the 2 outer sets of poles we did a few exercises between the blue and green sets of poles. At this point I was fine confidence wise with Legacy.
Some of the exercises we did were:
- Go through the blue set of poles and then through the green set.
- Go through the blue set of poles and either go on the a inside or the outside of the set of green poles.
- Same as above but opposite way around. Going through the green set and either way around the blue set.
These exercises were done on both reins.
After that we started to incorporate the orange set of poles. Were we would do big circles from blue through orange and smaller ones in between of orange and green then blue and green.
It took us pretty much the whole lesson to get a nice rhythmic trot out of Legacy this day as she was very much running in her trot. My Instructor was very determined to get a nice trot out of her before the end of the lesson and to end the lesson on a nice trot aswell.
When we started to incorporate the orange poles was when Legacy started to heat up a little. I hadn't been this far down in the arena with her for a while as we'd been working in the top quarter to half in 20m circles and on a square/rectange that way I could always have a good amount of control of her.
The control when she starts to heat up is definitely a communication error rather than her needing another bit, something not fitting correctly, her not being happy etc. As when she does heat up my first Instinct is to stiffen and tense up and pull back on the reins slightly. Now I know that both of these are something I need to work on. In terms of the pulling on the reins this is also something we worked on in the lesson as the instructor told me to try intermittently slightly pull on each rein and that if she doesn't go off on me to send her into the arena fence a little by turning her head. I did manage to find some control of her by trying these out and maybe we'll get there when I stop stiffening up.
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