Melting

What a week. London hit about 34 degrees this week which is too hot for me or the pony! Half Spanish he may be but he was born in Kent and really doesn’t cope with temperature over about 25 degrees. Poor thing. He came out in hives!!!! They’ve gone now but it was a bit worrying in the middle of the week. I think it just a heat reaction and he wasn’t much bothered fortunately.

So we haven’t done much actual training this week. We did have a go at some Connection Training work though, targetting a cone and sending to it and coming away. He enjoys his clicker sessions. Here’s some rubbish video:

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I did also get the SLR out again and take some summer photos. He really is my favourite of all his colours at the moment. He’s mostly a sort of deep mahogany to look at but in bright sunlight he goes quite orange!

Yesterday it was cool enough to get the saddle out and have our third ride since April! He was really good. It’s still pretty warm but we got some reasonable transitions and a few steps of both shoulder-in and haunches-in on both reins. I feel like we’re getting back to things. Need to arrange to do some hacking though!

Training things this week

Despite the heat we are making some progress I think. He’s getting calmer about saddling using the clicker to reinforce not nipping or puffing out behaviour. He’s standing much better to be groomed although his leg waving habit is very ingrained and will take a while to stop. He walked all the way to the arena yesterday, tacked up, without stopping at any point. So I’m pleased with all these.

The nipping is beginning to come back into the ST work, which is frustrating. I need to step back and take the pressure off again but I was starting to look for 2mm improvements. I think the LFS has improved, and the shoulder in isn’t too bad. The haunches in is still pushy so we need to go one step at a time I think.

He’s enjoying the connection training work so I think once session a week purely at liberty is a good idea. On the one hand this is a bit ‘chasing too many rabbits’ but I do think he enjoys the variety and the nipping and pushing comes back if we focus too much on one thing so I think I’ll stick with it for the moment!