Canter... and More Canter

Butterball was doing his weekly splish-splash time when his doctor stopped by to chat. He said since he's doing well to add in more canter. And then he said work up to FIFTEEN MINUTES of canter. I swear Butterball gave him a dirty look from the aquatred. Oddly enough, he said canter is easier on the tendons than trot. 

So naturally this one remark prompted a mini mental breakdown. As I said in my last post, doing so much trot and walk-trot-walk-halt rinse repeat has been really, really good for the canter. But now we're supposed to do 15 minutes of canter? It's clearly going to fall apart and become incredibly unbalanced and only maintained by me pushing constantly. Fortunately I had time to mull this over for 48 hours before trying to put it into practice. 

"Please don't" -Butterball

I downloaded another app to try to break things up into bite sized intervals. I didn't like it that well though. The nice thing about the timers on the phone is that I don't have to remember how many intervals we've done. It's two big chunks and one short one. I think we'll go back to that for the next ride. I tried setting the interval app for seven sets of two minutes work, one minute recovery. That sort of fed into my fears of the canter falling apart. Mentally I felt like I had to start cantering when the work timer went off, stop roughly halfway through, and then take our break for a minute. So I basically just ignored the timer the whole time. Helpful LOL. 

Part of the problem was the time intervals I chose anyways, we definitely don't need to do even two minutes straight of cantering at this point. I'm mulling over a better way to divide this up and ensure a slow and steady progression. But I'm also wondering if I'm just over thinking it anyways... He's been sound the whole time, I palpate the tendon obsessively both before and after. The swelling is barely noticeable unless you're me, but has been slowly and steadily improving the whole three months now. 

Happy Herd

The right choice is probably to continue our current work intervals that have been working well for us and just add in more and more *quality* canter work. We're still to avoid tight turns and deep footing, which is totally fine. Without the ability to do tight turns, I've been forced to focus more on quality riding. I can't substitute *that* many exercises for just riding the horse straight and even with push from behind. We do play with lateral work, and I've been getting more and more precise with the angle of our leg yields and doing shoulder-in with the body, not just the neck. But I can't spiral, I can't do 10m trot circles or 10-15 m canter circles etc. 

Which means that meeting JV last summer was probably the biggest, best, and most important change Butterball and I have made. His teaching continually repeats in my head. Every aid should get a reaction. If it doesn't, correct that. Then repeat the light aid. This is true for every single thing. And since every aid adds tension, don't use aids unnecessarily. Don't squeeze every stride just to maintain the pace. I really, really wish I'd ridden with a trainer like him prior to a year ago, but c'est la vie. His training methods have made pony pants into SUCH a fun horse to ride. He's light, he's responsive, he's steady. It's a cool feeling to trot around on him with no aids on just letting him swing. But we've been told not to do too much of that, so I throw in some forward and back (eventually with the idea of extend-collect), changes of direction and bend, etc. 

Anyways, just more rambles about more flat work with the best buckskin pony with no relevant media. But that's summer in Florida while rehabbing a tendon I suppose.