Favorite exercises for establishing forward!

[pluvinel]

@chancellor2

I wanted to thank you all for your ideas. The last three lessons have been great with some of these ideas! Thank you!

So what worked??? The suspense has me on the edge of my seat? Dying of curiosity.

[quietann]

One note: I don’t remember if you said that the horse in question is a stock horse or has Western training… But if he is, be careful how you switch your whip hand. The standard twirl over the horse’s neck can be VERY frightening to such a horse. I know from having done that once, turning onto the diagonal on a QH who was otherwise a pleasant ride… He took off bucking, I got imbalanced and only made things worse by tapping him with the whip with every stride, until my instructor yelled “drop your whip!” and the poor old guy halted.

[chancellor2]

Well, we had a good frank discussion about forward.
I was initially not sure about doing transitions as a way to get the horse forward but I tried it. And it helped.
I longed the horse last week and made sure that he understood that if he didn’t go when asked, there would be repercussions. (those being the sound of the whip in the air…no hitting of the horse was involved)
The other thing that really helped a lot was leg yield along the wall with his head turned to the wall. That demonstrated particularly wll to the rider how behind the leg he was.

[Pehsness]

Thankfully his only beef with the whip is when it asks him to work harder, lol. Otherwise you could light a bomb and he’s ok.

[Willesdon]

One thing that may help the rider is to use patterns of poles and/or cones in the arena. The focus then becomes making transitions and shapes to get around or go over the obstacle. This shifts the rider’s attention away from “getting it right” or whether something might go wrong. The need for “forward” is also very obvious.