In September, not long after my last blog post, I began taking lessons on Ace once a week with Michelle Just-Williams. (Please check-out her web site here:
http://www.justdressage.net/)
She is a genius and she has taken both of us, "back to basics."
We began our lessons by re-teaching Ace how to lunge and re-teaching me how to lunge him.
Contact was a concept I was familiar with but wasn't utilizing in all the ways that I should. I lunged Ace on a line, but I wasn't really using the line to communicate with him.
First, we had to teach Ace confidence. I literally began this re-training process (of myself as much as Ace) by teaching him how to walk forward on his own. This lead to walking around me on a line. Next we added trotting, and cantering.
Now I can send him away from me and using my voice ask for a walk, trot, canter and he responds. This is accomplishing multiple things. For one, it teaches him to respond to me and it teaches me how to read him. But, it is also building his muscles and teaching him balance and collection. When we began in September he couldn't hold a balanced canter for more than a few strides. Now he can hold it for 15 minutes.
Eventually, we added a saddle and bridle to this process. He had to learn all over again how to carry himself in a confident, balanced manner. But, now he calmly and confidently will walk, trot, and canter under saddle. As his muscles develop, it seems so does his mind.
The next step was to add me to the equation. We spent several lessons with me draped over Ace's back as loose dead-weight. I would just lie across his back with one foot half-way in the stirrup while Michelle lead him around the round pen. At first he could barely move. He literally didn't know how to put one foot in front of the other with weight on his back. His head would be in the air, his hind-end would be skirting around as if not connected to his front end, his back would be arched and tight. Then, eventually, he realized he could do it.
So, we swung a leg over and started the learning process again.
We are now to a point where I can ride him at a walk and trot around the round pen. We're still on the lunge line and only a few feet away from Michelle, but it's like I'm on a different horse. Him on his best day before isn't half the horse he is during a lesson now.
But, this post is supposed to be more about the teacher than the students.
Michelle doesn't tell me to do things differently, she explains them in a way I've never heard before so I understand what I'm doing (and why) in a way I have never been able to before.
We started feeding Ace carrots when working with him because a chewing horse is a confident horse. It's like tickling a crying child. If you tickle them it forces them to smile, and they can't cry while smiling. If we give Ace carrots it forces him to chew, and he can't have a meltdown while he's chewing. It's a simple idea. It makes perfect sense. But, I had never thought of it that way.
She used a lead rope to show me how Ace's back muscles connect to his neck muscles. Holding it straight across to demonstrate a relaxed Ace, and bending it down in the middle to demonstrate why his head goes up when he is about to spook.
It isn't that she has an immense amount of knowledge- though she does- it's that she explains it in the most perfect way.
She is totally re-teaching me how to have contact with the bit. For a girl who grew up riding little western ranch horses on incredibly loose reins it's a fairly new concept. But it's working with Ace. And I'm not against learning something new. She has me using the reins to "have conversations" with Ace. Currently he isn't responding exactly how he should be. But, he is responding. And as Michelle pointed out, for Ace, that's progress.
By trade Michelle is a dressage trainer, and it is the very basic, raw, concepts of this discipline that I am being taught. They are the basics that are going to add up to Ace being absolutely incredible.
Michelle is slowly but surely giving me the tools to be as successful as a trainer as she is. I'm years (probably tens of years) away from even being comparable to her, but that journey has begun. And every journey has to begin somewhere.
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