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[Pardon the lack of a title. I was fresh out of ideas. Again.]

This past Wednesday, I had another great ride on Gus. I had meant to write this post on Thursday, but time eluded me, yet again. Anyways, here's a quick recap of our lesson.

As usual, I warmed Gus up for about 15 minutes on the lunge line. And, as usual, Gus was stiffer then a board. Didn't seem to matter which direction we were going, he was stiff on both sides. By the time I finished with the lunging, he was moving a lot nicer and freer though his back.

Undersaddle work started off with a brisk walk and then right away into a posting trot. We started off the lesson on a giant figure-8, basically two 20m circles, changing directions BUT NOT CHANGING DIAGONALS at X. Boy, you would've thought that trotting deliberately on the wrong diagonal would be easy. Seriously though, it was really difficult.

Anyways, not sure exactly what the purpose of that exercise was, but well its another tool in my arsenal. Seem to help keep Gus moving down and out, along with adding some flexion.

After a few repetitions of that, both directions, we switched to working on shoulders-in (SI) and leg-yields (LY). Unlike our typical, SI down the long side, the turn on the quarter line and LY to the rail, this time B had us SI at a trot from corner to first letter, then walk (still in SI) to the next letter, then trot, then walk the finish in trot. THEN turn down quarter line and LY to the rail. Eventually, we even added in a few walk steps while on the LY. Was a lot of work to keep Gus moving up, from back to front, but we had some nice moments. The SI to the right was fabulous on Wednesday, and B thought that would be our difficult side.

Canter work was at the end of the ride again and well, by then Gus was nearly wiped out. We did easy canter work - 20m circle at  C/A and then a simple 1-loop on the counter-canter. We had a nice left lead canter, but by the time we switched to the right (just like, literally, 5 minutes later), Gus was done. So the right lead was kinda sucky on Wednesday, mainly due to Gus's exhaustion. We definitely need to work on getting his stamina built back up.

Overall, it was a pleasant lesson and gave me and Gus some good, new exercises to try to keep him supple and limber.

I did get new photos of him a week ago. I really need to get some new undersaddle photos but well, it's difficult to do that without anyone around. So, here's those new photos anyway.