Ville Vaurio riding

Today Ville came to ride our horses Vallu and Rama because he is super busy and could not come to train us over the weekend. So it was decided that it would be far more beneficial for both mother and I if Ville rode both of the horses.

But because it is Sod's law that everything happens at the same time, we also had Erika Törrönen, our chiropractor come check out one of our horses Basse today. These happened to be overlapping so that I did not have time to go see how Rama went and what exercises Ville did.

However, I did watch the entire time that that Ville was riding Vallu, who turned out to be quite good today! After I had walked Vallu for about 10-15 minutes, Ville got on to ride. He started with canter work, getting Vallu to relax and to soften. Once Vallu had been warmed up in both trot and canter, Ville started to collect the horse in the canter onto a shorter rein and higher neck. Ville carried on in the canter making sure that Valllu became quicker to react to his aids and to make the canter into a better quality canter, and then Vallu was put to work on some lateral movements, such as canter shoulder in and canter half pass on the diagonal followed by a single flying change. Vallu then had to practise his tempi changes - so four, three and two tempi changes were done and they turned out to be much better than before because Vallu was not rushing through them.

After these were good, Ville then practised some piaffe with Vallu, which was something that Vallu didn't want to do because his normally very good and bouncy piaffe was all over the place, and he was kicking back at the whip, which is totally not normal. However once Vallu gave in then the piaffe was quite good with the hind legs coming under nicely and both legs being lifted equally high off the ground. Between all of these exercises Vallu got a couple of minutes break in walk on a long rein to let him catch his breath. So again after a short break the next thing was some basic trot work as this is the pace that he needs most work in as he sometimes struggles to stay collected and thus will be quite heavy on the hand. However, after Karita's lessons it feels like the trot is improving and today Vallu could easily trot forward by himself and stay quite high, which was lovely to see. His shoulders were moving much better, producing a higher quality trot.

It had been about 45 minutes of hard work by now so after the good trot Ville started cooling Vallu down by letting Vallu be long and low in the neck but still having a forward going active trot. A few minutes later he got off and I walked Vallu until he was ready to go back to the stables for some well deserved rest sand some TLC!