I'm thinking about riding Rory again. His leg looks good, and while mine is at times still painful from getting kicked I have been able to ride my older horse. To prepare for riding I brought Rory out to do some work and remind him about the whole listening to me deal.
I longed for a few minutes and he was very good. Longeing is no challenge for Rory now. He understands what is expected and is very well behaved. To start giving him something new I decided to introduce the concept of leg yielding today. I stood beside him about level with the girth, took a rein in each hand and the dressage whip in my right hand. With the whip I could tap his side roughly where my leg will be making contact, and I had the reins short enough to be able to connect with his mouth.
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| Rory getting the idea of moving his legs sideways. |
We walked towards the wall on a shallow angle, and just as we reached it I slowed him down with the outside rein, kept his head turned towards the wall with the inside rein, and tapped his side with my whip to get him to step a bit sideways. Timing is everything, and at this stage of training I can't use more than one aid at a time, or have them too close together. I chose to focus on his inside hind foot as the key response, looking for it to step across under his body in front of the outside hind foot. The key aid to influence that foot was the whip tapping his side as he lifted it into the air (because obviously he can't move the foot sideways if he's got his weight on it). The rein aids had to occur at different times from the whip and from each other. I needed to experiment a little bit to figure out what order of aids was most effective. The best results came from using first the whip when his inside hind leg came up off the ground and swung forward (and over), followed by the outside rein as his fore foot lifted (this checked the forward movement and encouraged a little sideways as well), followed by a touch on the inside rein to keep the inside bend (as the use of the outside rein had a straightening effect on his neck).
Rory didn't have any idea what I wanted and tried various things like stopping, backing up, swinging his haunches away, trying to walk straight along the wall, and the like. Without knowing exactly what action I wanted him to do it would have been very easy for me to get distracted in trying to correct all the various experiments and missed it when he gave me the desired response. So I watched his inside hind foot, and applied the aids in turn, and when he stepped across with his inside hind I praised him, stopped and gave him a carrot. By the fourth trip along the wall on Nov 1st he managed to do several leg yield steps in a row without stopping.
I only worked on the leg yield off the left leg to start. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but it is important to set the horse up to be successful and reward the little steps in the right direction. In the beginning the horse really doesn't have any idea what is wanted and he is fumbling through his responses to the various aids to put together the more complex action. It is to a certain extent an accident when he gets it right, and when we reward that accident the horse will try it again. If we introduce too many different new things at once the horse is spending too much time being uncertain about what we want. We build their confidence by asking them to do things they know and understand and praising their correct repsonses. I'm finding this really obvious with using the food rewards in Rory's training. Once he understands something, and is confident in responding to my aids he loses interest in the carrot reward - a "good boy" and pat are enough. But when he is just learning and is very uncertain, he seeks the carrots as reassurance that he did actually do what I wanted. I sort of understood the idea before, but not in a way to be able to put it into words.
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