From Fleur last week to Gamir this week (or rather, Gamir last week and Fleur the week before that, since I am late again). I suspected that this meant we’d be focusing on cantering (since Murphy’s canter isn’t exactly the best, and Sammy is getting a little too old to do canter-focused lessons), and that turned out to be the case. Gamir has a very good canter. In fact, he’s almost a little too easy to work with, but it gives me plenty of room to concentrate on my own problems.
Gamir’s main problem (apart from occasionally trying to kill people while he’s being groomed and saddled, though he was relatively polite this time around) is that he’s getting on in years. In fact, he often feels a little older than Sammy, but I guess he’s still more fit overall. He just gets a lot stiffer, especially in his back, which has always been a problem area for him. At times, he’ll tense up a lot at the start of a lesson, and if you apply too much pressure before he’s loosened up, he’s very good at bucking. Fortunately, it seems to be worst during the winter, and they have also worked a lot on him with massages, so right now he seems to be pretty limber.
Because of his habit to tense up and buck, I have had some issues with being too cautious when riding him. He’s never bucked me off, he’s too polite for that, but it still makes me a little careful. This time around, I tried hard to place demands—but reasonable demands—on him right off. Overall, I think I had a decent response from him. I also managed to keep in mind that with Gamir it is very easy to get him moving too briskly instead of lengthening his strides, since he’s not long-striding by nature. His walk, in particular, ends up quite slow, but that’s when he’s most well-balanced.
The main exercise that we used was one where we turned down the centreline and made sure to prepare the side that would be our inner side for the canter (we alernated as we pleased between turning left or right) and walking almost all the way down to the end. But some distance from the end, we would ride a half-circle out to the main square, and it was somewhere along that half-circle that we were supposed to start cantering.
Given how well-trained Gamir is, we had no problems with the actual transition, though a couple of times he came in with a slightly too-fast walk. After a while, my instructor also asked me to start asking a bit more of him; I still don’t have a good sense of when to ask for more, or how much to ask for. She wanted the actual transition to involve more collection, a sense of him waiting with his weight on the hindleg initiating the canter, and she wanted him more collected and more engaged in the actual canter.
It was around this point that I ran into Gamir actually balking at doing what he was asked to do, by going sideways instead of actually taking the canter aid when being asked to do it in a more collected fashion. Its rather unusual for him to do that, she noted, so I guess it meant I had actually managed to ask a bit more than he was willing to give without some opposition. But, I asked again, a bit more firmly, and once we got past that hurdle I think I could feel some significant improvement.
I expect I will be continuing on Gamir next time too, so I will try to see if I can put actual demands on him a little more quickly. Without making it too much, of course.