Test

Today was Jake's day to workout with me. I wanted to try to go through as many of the intermediate exercises that I could do with him. There are 34 of them. So we got off to a calm start. I went through all of the ground work exercises. Some of them he needs work on, but he could do them. The last one which is bridle bending is the one that we need the most work on. That is where I use the rein and have him circle me while I bend his nose down and walk him around me. He is supposed to be bent around me and get soft with his poll lower than his withers while moving forward on the circle. He is real good at this on the right side, but the left side is much stiffer. Once he does that softly then I am to move his shoulder over while he is soft and bent. So his shoulder moves away from me. We didn't do this part because we were just starting to work on the bending. I will probably do that tomorrow with him. The last part of that is to YH and then back him up. He will do that with softness. Anyway by the time I got to that exercise we had already worked an hour. Then it was time to ride him. I was able to get through the first 12 exercises of the 17 in the riding section and that was not going through them with a lot of work on each one. He clearly needs more work. By the time we got to this point were we were doing some serpentines we had been riding for an hour. So that was a two hour workout with him. I had planned on working with him then moving on to Raven. But not enough time. I worked with Raven yesterday getting as far as I could. She does well too. I think Jake is better in some things than Raven.
I am planning on applying for a spot on Clinton Anderson's program to go to his ranch and have him work with me on the intermediate exercises. I have to make a video of me going through all 34 exercises in the level and then send that in. He will pick several people to come to his ranch for that purpose. So I am going to give it a shot.
That means I gotta get this down.