Asking too much too fast

I saw Memphis last night and did ride. I'm a little perturbed that he refuses to rack in the arena and wants to only skip to various ways of pacing. I'm not happy. BUT right now I'm working on reining with him not so much what gait he is in.

I can also proudly say that I am over my fear on him. When I first started riding him again in August I was terrified to go over a walk with him. Last night he had some serious SPEED going and I paid no attention to it. The only thing I want to get done is reining work. I want him to get out of direct reining. This is a two-fold approach for me because A.) I'm lazy and B.) it makes trail riding more enjoyable for me.

It's boring mundane work. Ask with the leg first, then ask with the rein on the neck, then ask with direct reining.

I'll dumb all this down a little. Leg aids with a horse are many many things. They tell a horse to go forward, tell a horse to move over, tell a horse to change a gait, or a whole list of things that I don't even know about. (can we say dressage anyone?) Right now Memphis only knows that legs mean go. A small tap on his side with my heel will make him move forward. Another tap and he speeds up. A good tap can really make him bolt.

Your calf is the next step up from your foot telling the horse to do something. This in my line of riding tells the horse to move over. (later it will help with switching gaits, but for now its move over) I use my legs to help "push" Memphis the direction I want him to go. So if I want him to go right, I'm going to push with my calf on his left side.

Later in this I am going to finesse this and use it for a tool called sidepassing which means that he will move laterally over for me (that's the best word I can come up with) but for the moment it just means go right or left.

Neck reining is much like the leg aids but much more refined. It's just lay the reins on one or the other side of a horse's neck to tell them to go whichever direction. So if I want him to go right then I lay the left reins on his left side of his neck.

Direct reining is just that. I want him to go right then I pull on the right rein. I directly tell him what I want him to do. This is cumbersome on trails as what I'm wanting is a relaxed ride, not to constantly be in a two handed riding position to ride.

So this is all I'm doing right now. Him and I got a walk down to a science. Now we are moving to reining. This could take a few weeks before it's perfect and we move onto the next lesson which will be more complicated leg aids. Then we are going to move back down to gaiting.

I started out wanting to work on gaiting first but that started to fall apart when I realized I was wanting more complicated things than Memphis knew how to do. So I've had to back track on what I wanted and start more with the basics.

Wow this is longer than I wanted.