What we did:
This week me and Haylie had some time on Monday to go and work with Beau. We started by stretching out his muscles by flexing his neck. This is a process that I used to do regularly but stopped so I was thrilled that he remembered how to flex and that he did it compliantly. Since Haylie has only worked with Beau once before she wanted me to start this week just so she can get a feel for what she needs to do. I lunged him and this went way better than I expected! Usually, I am terrified to lunge him but this week it went way better than it did last week. For comparison last week I couldn't even begin lunging him without getting hurt or run over, but this week he respected me much more, and with only slight resistance he lunged beautifully! Me and Haylie then worked on backing him to engage his hind quarters a little more which will help build up his top-line muscles and prepare him for the saddle.
What we gathered from this info:
After this week me and Haylie were happy with the progress that was made, it made us feel hopeful about reaching our goal. This week I felt like I had more control over him and I felt like I wasn't going to get run over. Me and Haylie felt much safer working with him this week than we did last week which is a good feeling. This gave us insight into what we need to zone in on and focus in on. After watching the videos we see that there is a little resistance when we ask Beau to lunge but not near as much as it was. This tells us that with more practice on lunging and the more reps we can get in of this that little attitude that is causing the resistance will go away. It also showed us that we need to work on engaging more muscles to prepare him for being ridden again.
What we plan to do next:
To continue making a lot of progress we discovered that fixing the little resistance he gives us with lunging is just going to come with lunging him more often. What we want to focus on next is engaging more of his muscles to build muscle development in preparation for being ridden again. We plan to do this by putting a saddle on him and lunging him which will knock out two birds with one stone. Another thing we plan to do in the following weeks is just put the saddle on him and back him up and eventually get on him and just let him walk figure-eights which will build shoulder muscle development and get him used to having a rider again.
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What our goal is:For our project, we are retraining my horse Beau. Our goal for this project is to retrain my horse Beau and experiment with barrel racing. We are doing this because me and Haylie have always wanted to experiment with speed events such as barrel racing and go through the process of training a horse. We decided that this would give us insight into whether we enjoy speed events and how the training process will vary. We are eager to see how the different training steps go with Beau and how he responds to them. How we plan to do this:We have decided to complete this project in individual chunks each focusing on a certain part of the training process. The first chunk will focus on gaining Beau's respect for our space and for us as individuals so that it will provide a safe foundation for us to begin our work. The next portion of this project with be the introduction to being saddled and getting Beau comfortable while moving around with the saddle. The third part of this will be the actual riding portion where we warm him up to being ridden again and just getting him used to that feeling again. The final part of this project will be us introducing Beau to the barrel pattern and progressively increasing his speed while running them. Proving success:We will prove our success by using videos of us throughout this process hopefully showing our improvement and progress throughout training and of Beau running the barrel pattern. Progress made this week:During our first week we decided to go ahead and see where we would need to start with Beau. In order to do this we started lunging and this showed Beau acting out and trying to hurt me while lunging him. This told me and Haylie that in order to gain respect while lunging we were going to have to assert our boundaries. I called my neighbor who has done pro-rodeos his entire life to come help me and Haylie and show us what steps we would need to take in order for us to become successful in asserting our boundaries. He told us that by using our lunge line and using it to lightly pop Beau shoulder and move him out of our space would prevent him from trying to hurt us by keeping him out of our space. He told us another thing too is to just keep him moving even when he doesn't want to move because it will show him that he can't be lazy and get that control over us. This overall showed us what we need to focus on in the following week. Coming up: Lunging and respecting spacial boundaries |
Hi there, our weekly blog updates will contain what we are working on and pictures from what we did that week. We hope you will stay and keep up with our progress to see the final product!
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