MONDAY Morning Blues…….

Early morning rides!! This morning we were having little flurries of snow!! IT WAS COLD! Brrrrrrr! So I made sure that we warmed up thoroughly and trotted fairly early on in a nice long frame concentrating on a nice big swingy stride – which she was happy to oblige!! ;o) We did this on both reins and also had a nice long and loose canter on both reins too which actually felt HUGELY better than on Saturday as did the trot :o) Once warmed up I started to ask for some transitions and again this felt very nice and smooth and she was really obedient to the leg which she can sometimes be a bit slow to react to! So I was feeling very pleased until I decided to put in a few smaller circles not quite 10m prob about 12m and instead of really slowing and stepping under as she was dong so nicely last week she was getting quite rushed and falling out of the circle to make it bigger and easier! Particularly on the right rein I just kept loosing her quarters and they were swinging out of the circle :o( I tried sitting the trot to influence the positioning more, but that didn’t work either and she was starting to stick her nose in the air and ‘scoot’ which is her evasion tactic but she hasn’t done that for a while so I was quite dissapointed in her reverting back to this stressy behaviour. I also noticed that I was ‘leaning in’ on the smaller circles too!! Ggggrrrrrrr!! I think I got a grip of it in the end but maybe im still doing it to a degree and putting her off??
I could tell she just didn’t want to activate her hind enough to be able to keep the trot slow and her body in correct alignment on the circle. So I thought Id do some walk pirouettes to really try and get her hind legs ‘marching’ a little more through the turn. She wasn’t very impressed with this to start off with but once she realised what I was asking her to do she performed a couple of nice 180 degree turns on each rein. Then I did a bit of haunches in on a circle on the right rein and then asked for trot, the trot definitely felt better and we did manage to perform one nice 10m circle without loosing the 1/4s too badly so I left it at that – as I had already run way over time lol!
Which got made worse as she was quite bargy through the gate this morning so I spent 5 mins correcting this behaviour making her halt EXACTLY when I gave the command and wasn’t just wandering off in lala land ***rolls eyes*** Cue frantic rushing around for the rest of the morning – Heaven knows how I made it to work on time! But I did just by the skin of my teeth!

So on reflection, here are my musings – please feel free to comment :0)
1.Has the Chiro work re-aligned her and she just has to re-adapt to this within the work again?
2.Am I making her crooked and she is now straight but it feels wrong to me because my ‘feel’ is outa whack?
3.Maybe the ‘flying friesian trot’ was to blame for her not wanting to flex her hocks as much as she was cos its far easier for her to push not spring?
4.Maybe she is a bit stiff after chiro and weekend work?
5.Im panicing the chiro has messed things up! ARRGGHH!!!

WHAT DO YOU THINK GUYS???