Assessing fitness

When we take the horses home from the pasture, we have to check what form they are in so we know how to plan the work ahead.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I like the pasture where we have our horses very much.
It is natural meadowland, so they have a wide menu of grass and other green plants to choose from, and they don’t put on too much weight.
In addition it is hilly, stony and full of trees. They have to move around and watch where they are going to get the belly full. Nice, huh?

When we get them home they are normally in a pretty good shape.
They have lost a bit of top line and you cannot ask for too much of the more collected work, but the ground condition is there.
And you can tell they think it is fun to get to work again, just like us!

What I notice when we get them back is that they are used to think for themselves, so they show their own opinions a bit more.
Not getting opinionated, but you get a slight hesitation sometimes. I don’t mind that communication. They are also bit more watchful of things and sounds in the surroundings.

I believe the break does a lot of good, both mentally and physically.
Many people keep the horses going through the show season during the summer, and then give them free a month in Nov/Dec.
Not much grass then, but if the horses have been working hard during the summer it does them good to get some time off anyway.

So back to the work at hand.
Fame had now had free from training for six weeks, so when I took her out to the arena I had planned to keep the session short but a bit up in tempo, to check out how much energy she had.
I decided to work a bit on the David Oliveira exercises.

The day was warm, so before we started the work, I gave her a shower to cool down.
She loves that, and moves around a bit like they do when you scratch them...a bit up to the left, please! And now on the other side?
I then walked off and mounted her from the mounting block, which I always use to spare her back and mine (and the saddle).
When she walked past the shower she stopped.
I put my leg on, and she took two more steps and stopped again.
I just had to laugh. She was clearly showing me that she wanted to be hosed down some more. As I wasn’t pressed on time, I jumped off, and gave her another shower.
She enjoyed it very much, and when I mounted her again she was ready to go to work.
(Aren’t our horses wonderful?)

After warming up in walk and posting trot, I started to canter her, just getting a nice forward canter in a light seat around the arena first.
Then we started with the exercises.
Leg yield in canter along the long side, moving into a small volte at the end. Transition to walk. Canter again, other lead, needed a quick reaction. Leg yield, small volte, transition to walk. Rein back, and new canter.
As I would like Fame to be a bit quicker in her reactions and in the hind legs, this is very good training for her – in particular now when she is returning from the pasture and I can feel a small delay in responding to the aids.
She has a good canter and lateral movements, but we have not been working with leg yield along the long sides before, just along the diagonal.
When David worked he asked for much sideways movement, almost keeping the horse to a 90 degree angle to the wall.
We worked with a smaller angle, to make it easier and to keep the forward movement, but steep enough to get a good workout.
Once Fame got the hang of it, she thought it great fun!
So we just played around for a bit, checking things out. I kept the session short but I actually felt I had a tougher time returning to work after a lazy summer than she did, lol!
When I trotted her to round off at the end, she offered extended trot by herself. A good sign that she had worked well with the collected work, and that she was feeling fine and in good shape.

We finished with a new shower and some green grass ;)