Tally Whoa: A Revisit

Horse: Tally
Tack: My Western Saddle, a Tie Down (decently tight by my standards) and a combo gag/hackamore
Purpose: Transitions Downward

Description:
So, last time Tally felt mostly out of control so today when my second ride was a no-show it seemed like the perfect opportunity to revisit her schooling. We had already gone on a 45 minute trail ride so we were pretty well warmed up and ready to go.


I first wanted to experiment with switching her from her usual gag/hack combo to just a hack. Last winter we found that she steers and collects better in a bit but stopped better in a hack. Well, she now steers and collects in a hack but definitely not the stop we need. Back to her usual bridle set up!


In the start I felt like she was overly sensitive in the leg. We worked a bit to desensitize that and I think we made a lot of headway. She still sometimes fishtailed as a mis-response to leg cuing but we did a lot better. We did a lot of warm up with differentiating between leg yields, bends and forward cues.


Tracking left I felt like we got a decently balanced trot and a very very balanced canter. While her transitions between speeds tracking right felt better, the balance definitely did not feel as good. Her trot going to the right was bouncier and less guided. Her canter was always on the proper lead but just didn't have the nice free-flowing rhythm that we got on our left lead. 


We spent a lot of time circling. Three circles down and three circles back on every loop around the arena (SE corner, E side, NE corner, NW corner, W side, SW corner, etc...). I'm always impressed at how easy it is to circle Tally and steer her. As mentioned before, it was much easier to get her to balance, and therefore turn without leaning or shouldering out, to the left. Tracking right we had a lot of fishtailing and overflexing of the neck. 


The entire experience reminded me of one thing important for my own self-growth: the importance of the outside rein. I'd catch myself not reinforcing her turn with the outside and merely relying on a lifted inside rein and, wow! when I engaged that outside rein things would change quick. Her fishtailed butt would flip back in place and her head would pop back in front of her body. But she'd still keep turning, following my gaze. It was nice to get a lesson from Tally instead of me always teaching her!


Because today was downward transition today my overarching goal was to get her to exaggerate her slow-down. Every time we stopped we would go backwards. Trot to  to walk to whoa then backwards. Trot to whoa then backwards. Canter to trot to walk to whoa then backwards. Canter to walk to whoa then backwards. We never really got a fabulous canter to whoa but it was worth trying. By the end Tally was pretty sick of the backwards concept, but her halts were much better.


As our downward transitions improved so did our upward transitions. Because Tally is actually a decently vocal horse, I really wanted to mingle vocal cues into her upward transitions. For instance "can-TER" with a inside reinforcement on the "can" and a outside cue directly on the "TER." Her walk to trot still sometime starts with a hop, but she was truly settling into it. We had a couple really phenomenal walk to canter transitions and a lot of nice trot to canter transitions.


At the end I had Colin take a video. Tally was pretty tired by this point and we had a couple "moments" and there is still a lot of room for improvement but I think there's some good parts as well.