While Laurie is in CA I wanted to work a bit with Brego and advance his training a bit. It's a tough call for me to know how much to do or not do with him since Laurie wants to experience the training part. A person learns more from doing it themselves more than having someone else doing it for them. So, I'm trying to find that right balance of what I should do.
The general guideline I've come up with is something like this. Laurie needs to know everything I know so she has to go thru some of the "pain" of learning the right things to do. However, I can work with Brego on some of the things that Laurie is working on to advance his part of the training faster. So, Laurie still has to know how to do it, but once she has experienced learning the techniques I can help Brego learn his part faster. There are also some things that are just very difficult for Laurie to do due to her being short. An example of that is teaching Brego to sidestep over to you when you're standing on something and want to mount. In the beginning you use a carrot stick to reach over his back and tap him on his opposite side. My long arms make this doable but Laurie just doesn't have the reach. So, I worked on that with Brego until he started to get the idea. Now Laurie can work on it more without needing the long reach that's required in the beginning of this training.
I spent only a few minutes doing the basic warmup, groundwork stuff. The I saddled him up and worked on sidepasssing along the fence, then out in the open and then over a log. He did pretty well at that. I also started getting him used to jumping over a log about 12" off the ground. I did this from the ground, not on his back. I'll do it from the saddle later. We also worked more on lateral flexion under saddle using the spiral pattern (Laurie hasn't seen this one yet). I worked on his gait a bit more. It was a great session and I think Brego enjoyed the new challenges.
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