Day 27: November 1 - Paradigm Shift

I had Brother Twitchell ride Poncho today during class. I learned a ton! I think my problem is that I've been erring on the side of being to...gentle with him. When we train our horses back home, we are a lot more forceful with them. We still do plenty of the pressure and release, and giving them rewards, but we ask them to do more sooner than what I feel like we've done in class, or at least than what I've done with Poncho. And I think that is what I'm doing wrong.

When Brother Twitchell was riding, he got very big to ask for the trot, and then after he was doing that pretty good, he asked for a lope, and continued to get bigger until he picked it up. He didn't ask him to maintain the lope for long, but he got rewarded for picking it up. By the time I got back on him, Poncho was breathing really hard, and was tired. So, I think that's what I need to do. I need to stop focusing on trying to make him happy, but start making him do these things and help him to realize that it's not all bad, and there's really no reason for it to make him mad.

I'll have to use a savvy string to get results sometimes.