Giant - freezing cold and windy day so I gave him a lunge first to make sure he was well warmed up. Just aswell too, he seemed fine for a while, started on the right rein and he w/t/c really nicely, over on the left rein though I asked him into canter and he went into a bucking fit... took a few minutes to get him to settle down properly, but then he was good.

Today focused mainly on getting him to stretch forward down and out. So in walk (where fdo is easy) I started him off using flexions to each side to get him to soften and chew and then offering the rein so that he "chews the rein forwards". Then we went on to do the same in trot, just doing lots of big circles and serpentines encouraging him to go fdo. Little by little we get there.

He finds it harder to soften properly flexing to the left. To the right he chews quite nicely, left he still wants to tilt his head a bit and do this big grinding on the bit so I was trying to ride him through that a bit. We also did the same in canter, again, to the right he does well and was having a little go at stretching out, to the right he finds it more difficult and wanted to turn on a small circle rather than flex properly, but getting him to soften a couple of times helped him when we came back to a trot, he stretched out a bit more than before.

Harry - We worked on the samething as with Giant, he gets it quite well when he is relaxed, and when he isn't its a good way to help him relax. We did some canter on the left lead (the good one) where I lengthened his frame in trot a bit, asked him to canter and then tried to maintain that frame in canter. This is difficult for him, in canter he just wants to lean and get fast, but he improved. After the trans back to canter I got him to stretch out even more to get him to relax.

On the right rein he worries about the lead and gets himself all flustered, so everytime he got like this I got him to stretch out a bit and waited for him to settle before we tried canter again. Usually now he just needs time to get himself organised and thinking about what hes doing, like a right handed person writing with their left hand it seems to take a lot of concentration for him to get it. We ended with a couple of nice trans where he came back to a trot and allowed me to flex him better and just settled.