Cob Jockey

You may have noticed I haven't written about riding lately. Part of that is because I've only been riding 2-3x a week for a while now. Many reasons - some which are motivation related, some of which are related to my husband, who still can't stay awake past the time we used to eat dinner before the seizure. Sort of puts a damper on being at the barn late.

Part of it though is that I'm working through some things that I'm not sure I fully understand yet, definitely not well enough to write about them.

I know a couple of things to be true. One, he REALLY likes this saddle. And thank goodness for that, am I right? Haha.

He's going with no resistance whatsoever, to anything, and is so willing to lift his back in it. For the first time in a Dressage saddle, I find myself not even thinking about the effect the saddle has on him, and that feels amazing.

The other is that the musculature on either side of his neck and either side of his thoracic sling is wildly imbalanced. You can feel it, you can palpate the muscles on both sides and feel how much different they are.

Spying on me as I put my boots on

Like seemingly half of the blogosphere, I had a 1:1 with Celeste about six weeks ago. I still don't have enough of a fully formed thought about it to write a post about it, but it was interesting. I can't say I've been as consistent as I should've been with the homework, but even still, he's made a lot of progress in releasing his underneck since that lesson (he, um, would NOT even lower his head a little during that lesson. It was wild to realize how afraid he is of balancing, even standing still while on the ground, without using his underneck). 

 I haven't ridden enough to really develop any new muscle and yet the shape of his neck has changed so much, people reached out to me to ask what I was doing after seeing this photo on Instagram:

So I'm trying to ride with a lot of feel. Do the reins feel even? Can I move both forelegs away from his body? Are both hind legs active? Am I sitting evenly?

You can imagine this is not a recipe for getting changes in time for show season, but I'm okay with that. This feels so much more important, given that his head shaking continues, but in ways that I know are tied to his muscular imbalances.

So that's where we are. More questions than answers, but we keep on keeping on nonetheless!