Where all settled into our winter routine here at CT dressage, it already feels like we've been mucking out endlessly.
Eavie our Yearling loves her winter routine she is the first at the gate to come in. She is the little princess of the group & my god does she live up to it. She is definitely destined to be a dressage diva.
Castle Troy is doing really well in his training & is starting to really come back to the standard we were at before the accident.
Our Oldies Sam & Murphy are all fluffy in their winter coats & chomping through Haylage at a rate of knots.
So onto our recent training, we took Galante our British Bred 4yo PRE for our monthly training clinic with Andrew Murphy. This was at a new venue & Indoors, Galante had never been in an Indoor before but I was confident he would take it all in his ever growing stride.
He did & despite being a little nervous having a few shouts he worked really well, i was very proud of my young horse.
We worked on Flexions of the Jaw, Jowel & neck this made Galante so even in both hands i felt like i could of ridden any movement with him.
At the end of our 1st session Andrew & I had a long discussion.
Andrew had realised I had Inner confidence issue's with my riding ability. I have a preset "Dressage Mode" which I go into when I’m riding in front of people or being taught.
This means I present what I believe to be a pretty picture & what i think others want to see, but i loose my effectiveness. In training I’m a great student & do everything I’m told but to the detriment of my riding.
Andrew quickly broke this down & really start to coach me through this issue, Andrew said he could tell i had bags of feel but i need to ride for me as I’m a beautiful rider.
So with all this taken on board I set off for our 2nd lesson with Andrew, this session was very different as Andrew only felt he had to be eye's on the ground. He wanted me to ride as I do at home.
I did this & it was a fabulous session, Andrew really liked what I did & how I corrected any niggles that were thrown at me from Galante. I felt at home in the environment that Andrew had created & we produced some of our best work to date. Towards the end we worked on & back in the trot, Galante really does have so many gears that are yet to be established it's very exciting. Andrew was shouting score's & each time we had a 9 :)
We now have the drive to make that score a 10 :)
At the end of the session Andrew congratulated me for my riding, he said I hadn’t ridden a wrong move at all & I had produced some wonderful work. I just need to keep riding for me & allow myself to be confident in my ability.
I find this hard as I have never been the most confident person, so it makes a lot of sense that I would take this lake of inner confidence to my riding. This is something I’m really going to focus on over winter.
Galante is now ready to go out & gain some competition experience so we will be choosing some venues to get out to over winter.
Keep an eye on our blog to find out how we go over Winter.
