Friday is Maggie Day

Maggie does this thing when you ask for the trot from a walk -- a head toss with a twist to the right, and then she starts trotting. I suspect she needs her teeth floated but the weird thing is that she does it even on a totally loose rein so I think it isn't only the teeth.

I did an exercise that I like for tuning up transitions; I pick a number (I tend to pick twelve) and then do that many strides at the walk, then ask for a trot and do that many trot strides, then back to the walk and do that many strides, and so on several times either around the whole arena or on a large circle. You can do it with any two gaits and vary the number if you like. My favorite way to do it with trot-canter-trot transitions is to start at a number and make the number smaller by one until you get down to just two strides of each gait between transitions.

Anyway, Maggie is way too green for the canter one or the descending numbers of strides so we just did twelve strides of walk, twelve strides of trot, twelve strides of walk etc. She did eventually stop doing the head toss so it may just be behavioral but I'll have her teeth checked anyway. To cool out we went outside and walked around the property a bit. She even got kind of peppy when she was heading up a hill and wanted to do a big draft trot there. She was a very, very good pony today.