Cob Jockey

My lesson last night was actually in the outdoor, but have some random pictures I haven't shared yet.

I forgot my gloves last night.  I blame our housemate/basically my brother Mark, who asked if he could bring my dogs to the barn and watch my lesson, so I was distracted.  (Fun fact: Mark is Liz's friend from college in West Virginia.  I met him at CrossFit.  The blogging world is small, yo.)

I totally did not do this trendy double arrow design on purpose, but I may in the future.  The bottom arrow is from the first clip, and the top one is from the second clip, when I decided I wanted a higher point.

Because I forgot my gloves, I assume, my trainer's laser vision went to my day-glo white hands and stayed there the entire lesson.  She got onto me for:

- Always having my right hand higher than my left hand
- Pulling back in my arm for rein cues rather than using my fingers
- Having the rein too close to my palm
- Having too much tension in my ring and middle fingers instead of my index finger and thumb
- Pulling him around turns using the reins rather than pushing him around turns using the reins
- Not using my seat to slow him down *

The asterisk is because normally I don't have a problem with that, BUT, at the beginning of my lesson the BO's daughter's fiancee started playing fetch with the new barn dog, a year-old Bernese Mountain Dog that weighs more than I do, right next to the arena.  Connor just about lost his shit over that, and never really settled down afterwards.  So, I'm going to take a pass on that one, knowing we got that under normal circumstances.

This dog is 110lbs of GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO all the time.

Even though he never really stopped running through my "slow down" aids, he WAS really steady in the contact.  It makes a lot of sense that if my whole hand/arm moves to give aids, the contact isn't steady, so I need to exclusively use my fingers and keep my hands in the same relative place.



The good news is, I have lessons on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday this week and the next thanks to the two-lesson-a-week policy and not being able to take more than one the last two weeks due to scheduling, so we'll get a hands bootcamp.  There's no better time to make a big positional change than in the middle of six lessons in two weeks.