Liberty Work

Can you tell it's raining? I've actually posted 2 days in a row in almost a year! It started raining yesterday, and it has not stopped yet-it's supposed to continue into next week.

I'm less than excited about riding because Judy is selling her dressage saddle that I have been borrowing for the last 4 months while waiting for my Spanish saddle to arrive. My saddle is *supposed* to arrive in about 2 weeks or so. I hope it does. In the meantime I'm borrowing Diana's Wintec All Purpose but it does not really fit Lily, even after changing the gullet, and riding in short stirrups again was a mission. I have a bum knee from work (all that kneeling on tile floors will really kill your knees), and it just hurts to ride at hunter/jumper length nowadays. I rode her in it once, and she was going inverted again, and refusing to relax and extend her trot. It didn't help that I felt like I was flopping around all over the place-the saddle was slippery when combined with my riding jeans, and it felt like it was slipping around on her back as well. Cantering was out of the question. I was in all over pain after 20 minutes of walk and trot. I'm thinking it might be a major setback to ride her in this saddle for any length of time. So I guess we'll be focusing on groundwork.

We have been trying out some of the Hempfling theories from his book, "Dancing with Horses". It seems so simple when you read it, but is actually much harder in practice. Lily and I already have a sort of established language, and I've used the Hempfling book more as a guide than as a rulebook and played with the signals she already understands. The result: I have been working her in one of the paddocks at liberty, cordoning off one section of the paddock with 2 longe lines to turn it into a square, and am now able to get her to transition up and down walk, trot, canter, change directions by turning to the inside, and half halt. The half halts are interesting. If I suddenly crouch, she interprets it as an order to half halt, and she does, very dramatically! She'll practically do a sliding stop, then continue on the next slower gait with barely a pause. It's very impressive. Not what I was intending with that signal, as all I wanted was for her to stop, period, but the half halt is harder when done this way, so I'm pretty happy that she is able to do this. I still haven't really figured out a way to get a clean half from her at liberty. My one big win was that I was finally, FINALLY able to get her to "join up" or come to me of her own volition. She had never done this before.

Recently, I turned her loose in the arena, and tried doing the same. She chose to work around the "track" of sorts outside of the dressage arena perimeter, but I could get her to transition up and down with the same effectiveness as in the square paddock despite the huge distance between us. She would change directions by turning to the outside instead of the inside, but we'll work more on that. She will stand and wait for me, but she won't yet come to me when we are in the arena. We've only done this twice, so I'm hoping this will eventually happen, too. I'm going to look up more Parelli videos and try implementing this in what we're already doing, as I think he breaks it down more effectively than Hempfling, though I do prefer Hempfling's lack of gimmicks.

2 photos of Lily trotting while being worked at liberty in the arena