Second drive around

Sunday I put Kat to the cart again and mostly just focused on walking. Because he has gotten a little pudgy, he was more than happy to start out slow and keep it that way. We worked on bending and softening for starters, and when he decided to jog, I let him. I also dropped my right rein for the most part. If I wasn't holding onto it, I couldn't hang onto him.

When going to the left, I had to pick up my right rein here and there, to keep Kat out on the rail or to keep him from cheating his circles, but he did pretty well without it to lean on. Fixing my mistakes is helping fix his habits.

We ended up working on his normal trot, extended trot, collected trot, the three variations of his walk, halts, backing up, large circles, small circles, pivoting the cart on one wheel, serpentines and anything else I could think of. We also sort of worked on the 'long and low' work as described in the prelim dressage tests for the ADT's. What I ended up using as the 'cue' for it was contact in the begining and slowly letting him have more rein as I eased him forward to find that same contact.

Maybe I will come up with a voice command to go along with it later on, but for now this seemed to work. He seemed to understand what I was asking of him or at least it felt that way in the cart. At least when you are riding, you have your legs to help you. You also have a buckle in your reins in a useful spot. If I were to drive 'on the buckle', he could literally stop and graze. There would be no control.

Overall Kat did really well and I am quite pleased with him. Maybe I will just keep his workouts to a minimum, his food a little on the large portion side and his weight a little heavy on the hoof. Then he won't be so inclined to get all wound up and misbehave.  Even if he does, he would be too out of shape to sustain it for long...  Of course the flip side of all of that would be him getting injured because he is out of shape and that's a road I just don't want to go down.  There's got to be a happy medium, right?