A first ride at home

As of the writing of this post, my creature doesn't have a barn name. I'm working on it, okay?

BGT (big grey thing) had an owner/trainer who sold him to me, and the trainer offered to come out and help me with my first ride.

I was leading him around the arena working on taking big exhales and helping him make a better posture while I did that when she showed up. I immediately felt terrible, I'd had every intention of being on board when she arrived, but he also took longer to settle than I had anticipated.

My education in terms of basic handling of horses has changed a lot, and soon I'll have to write about some of that because it matters a lot in the development of this horse... but the biggest thing for this moment probably is my involvement in learning about Anna Marciniak's work regarding Conscious Relaxation.

All that to say, the trainer showed up and told me to lunge BGT, which I did. He's a bit... explosive in the trot-to-canter transition, but pretty reasonable the rest of the time. Once I felt safe to get on him, I did.

She told me he needs to spend a lot of time in the walk, that sometimes she'd have a helper get on and walk him for thirty minutes before she rode him because sometimes he can distort the rhythm of walk and jig along, neck pushed back at his rider, a bit anxiously.

Noted.

In trot, we spent a lot of time working on riding him across the ground, at a tempo that when I watch the video looks way too quick.

Tracking right, we had a gravitational pull at the gate, and all my normal tools to put the shoulder back into place didn't seem to work, and the trainer kept encouraging us to go forward, forward, which to some extent did help to sort out the shoulder at the gate. 

She stayed very on top of me not to pull, so I found myself riding with pretty much no contact for most of the lesson. I've been scolded in the past for overdoing corrections. 

When we moved to canter, I was coached to sit a few strides and kiss to him. I think that was helped out a ton because she was in the middle of the circle helping him along. 

Megan came out and videoed most of the lesson for me, so that's where these lovely screenshots come from. We wandered around the barn and chatted about a bunch of things after the lesson. I'd have to say that my main takeaways for this horse after that lesson was that he needs to be pretty onward bound in order to have some stability in the steering and that I was going to have quite a project ahead of me in terms of "leg means go." 

But seeing as I'm never one to overdo anything, I, of course, go on to schedule a bunch of lessons with a bunch of trainers over the next few days. Can't hurt to get a ton of input, right?