Matt Frost was amazing as usual, he is a great trainer & bring so much humour to his lessons that you cant help but enjoy them. On the Monday we worked on Lateral work, with our Medium debut not far away it was important for Matt to have a look at it. Galante is now a very supple horse, but he does block me slightly in the neck in Half pass & Traver he brings his head way up & then hollows over the back if he can.
The way we have counteracted this was to ride the lateral work in a deeper rounder frame, this worked very well & helped to keep him soft & swingy through each step.
Matt was very pleased with our work & said that the next session would be working on the Flying changes.
So the next day we toddled back to see Matt, Galante came out quite hot i was expecting him to be behind my leg & tired but no he was mega forward. He warmed up lovely so Matt then said right lets go with the changes.
Now changes are something we havent yet played with so i was a little eeeek with how Galante would take to it. We started with riding a 10 mtr circle in canter on hitting the centre line i took the shoulders in the new direction & then did a change of leg through trot. We did this on both reins.
Then it was time to do the changes, same thing as above but this time after i had taken the shoulders to the new direction i asked for the change, well the first few where huge!! I lost stirrups & we found Galante was very good a disunited canter lol.
However at a couple of rough attempts we finally started getting clean changes, Galante was mega.
Pic's below of our Flying change attemps -
On Sunday we made our way down to Dovecote Stables the home of Equine Ethos for our very special lesson with Andreas Hausberger, 1st Chief Rider of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. All i can say is i was NERVOUS very nervous, i spoke to a few people who had already had there lessons & they said Andreas was lovely.
So before i knew it i was in the stunning indoor arena looking at a load of spectators who where all waiting to hear who i was & about Galante, i was really bricking it.
Andreas really tried to get a picture of my riding experience, i have to say i didnt really do myself any favours as a few mins into the Piaffe work Andreas said " YOU ARE an EXPERIENCED RIDER ", my reply " am i ", Andreas " YES you REALLY ARE, i can tell from your reactions to the horse".
So as you can see i really must of come across as a wannabe dressage rider lol.
Anyway the lesson was fantastic Andreas really liked Galante & said i was a good rider who made his job easy. Andreas worked with me on starting Galante's Piaffe & Passage Andreas walked beside us for both.
Galante picked up the idea for both Piaffe & passage very quickly think it was maybe the amout of sweeties he kept being fed lol.
But this work really improved the Trot & canter, we ended the session with Canter work, going from working to collected & sprialling in to a very small 8 mtr circle.
It was fantastic & i will hopefully get the chance to train with Andreas again.
