After a few weeks filled with groundwork and longeing with Romanesque, I started to combine it with work in hand.
And gradually, over the last couple of weeks, we're progressing from doing the sequence in walk, in trot, and now also in the canter. Of course, there's a lot to 'polish' and refine, but again, the mind didn't forget what it learned.
Therefore, the mind is not the limiting factor at the moment, it's more the body that has to grow stronger and get more flexible so it will be more mobile, and that just takes time.
As always:
The 'teaching' phase - where you teach your horse something completely new - often takes 2 seconds to 2 weeks, but the 'optimizing phase - where you refine and polish with 2mm at a time - lasts a lifetime!
And especially, if you have been out of the running, you have to take a few steps back and build it up from scratch again, layer by layer.
Now after work in hand, I always do some longeing to stretch the muscles.
Especially after the collected work in hand, it's important to stretch the muscles again, because if you don't, over time, it might lead to short muscles.
Now to give you an idea of my laboratory, here are some snippets:
