Rolling It on Back

Riding lesson this past Friday was interesting. We have been working on flexibility and ease of turning, particularly at the canter.

 

My trainer decided to introduce rollbacks. The jumping kind. The kind where you go over a jump and two strides out turn towards the wall and change direction. Everything help you if you land on the wrong lead and your horse is stubborn that we go “THAT WAY”… 

 

We started out with cross rails, but Ashe barely put any effort into them. They were more for me to get the feel of what I should be doing and to introduce him to the fact that “No, we are not turning away from the wall but into it”. After a bit we bumped it up to a good 2’ vertical and added cantering… 

 

Getting him on his right lead canter is difficult enough, now you’re adding in jumping (butt weight in direction of turn) and then in two strides later  (Look, Sit up, lift inside shoulder, lift and half halt inside hand, put on outside leg/knee) turning him sharply to the outside (encouraging him to lift with his back end to turn) all while making sure we’re changing leads. This boy has yet to do any sort of flying lead change on cue as well (He generally does them over jumps himself, but we have not attempted this yet on the flat). 

 

Half the time he lead changed perfectly, half the time he did the front, but not the back. However  we really got the pattern down (Him even turning in the right direction when I got my rights/lefts confused) focusing on right canter lead to left turn. My timing needs work, I’m still holding two point a little too long after the jump which affects how well he can bring himself back and under to turn. It also helped me to feel where my seat bone weight is and that should help us with cueing the canter as well J

 

He was a real trooper though! She gave me some specs to practice on my own. I hope to have a video clip of us doing this soon!