Mary Wanless explains how to fix a failing training session: stop repeating the broken exercise and step back to something simpler. She walks through how Millie fixed Tinker's uneven medium trot by returning to leg-yield and shoulder-in on the weaker rein to rebuild the hind leg mechanics.
If you get into trouble with your training session, the best thing to do is to try and break down what the problem is. But it's really important not to keep throwing yourself against a brick wall with a horse. You know, if you find yourself trying to ask the horse more activity and, and it doesn't happen, there's a whole bunch of reasons that you'll need to sort of figure out to correct that. And it's also important not to keep practicing bad patterns. So if you're in walk and the horse is nice and round and you move up into trot and it's good for a bit, and then it starts getting a bit worse and a bit worse and a bit worse, there's nothing worse than continuing on, hitting your head against a brick wall, trying somehow to rescue the problem. It is always better to bring it back a level and do the movement in a more basic form. So in other words, you could come back from trot to walk, for instance, if you find your shoulder in being difficult, you could come back to groundwork, you could come back to doing leg yielding, you could come back to doing demi pirouettes, for instance, if you find your horse's medium trot being flat, you could perhaps back off and start doing little trot, big trot. You could start doing some 10 meter circles or shoulder in, for instance, or leg yielding. Recently, Millie noticed that in one direction, the horse did a really good medium trot across the diagonal, in the other direction it wasn't so good. And this actually turned out to be Tinker's right hind, which always struggles a little bit with, with getting to step underneath in the same way the left hind does. So she solved that actually and really evened things up by doing leg yield a little bit more on this right rein and getting that horse to start stepping underneath with the right hind and also doing shoulder in, which also got the right hind to step in underneath. And that really did a good job of evening out the medium trot through both hind legs. So it's kind of sometimes figuring out what that problem is.
