Giant - warmed up on big circles encourging him to stretch fdo in trot, he understands the attitude of what I'm asking him, but hasn't yet actually done it, although a few times hes tried. This can take a while to do properly, its easy to manipulate them to putting their head down, not so easy to get them to willingly stretch forwards and they have to physically ready for it so they don't just fall on their shoulders and drop in the withers. He'll get there, I think it will be his favourite thing lol.

Then we worked on getting his downwards trans from canter to trot better, slowing the canter, waiting and then rising into trot, so that I could introduce canter lead changes through trot. Firstly we just went on a circle and did canter trot canter trans, then used a figure of eight to get him to pick up the other lead. We started by doing about 10 strides and got it down to 5, he was good, he only got it wrong once.

Eventually he will do only 3 trot strides on a straight line. And then through walk...

Harry - Only working on that canter now, after a quick warm up we started. He got the lead 3rd or 4th time and I thought we had finally got there. Apparently not. After another 30 or so he didn't get it again. So I made it a bit more clear, everytime he struck off wrong I halted him and backed up, then waited in halt for a second for him to settle, and started again.

It took a bit, but finally the penny seemed to drop. He got the right lead again, and then again a few minutes later and then to end with he finally got it 3 times in a row. Sometimes he pops onto it easily, I think this is when he does it by accident so it sort of doesn't help in training him to do it. Usually its very difficult and takes half a circle of coaxing before he can pick it up, but when he does get it the canters fine. I think its all in his head, perhaps he has had an injury at some point (hes uneven behind) which prevented him from doing it and that has stuck even though he can do it now. It would have been way too difficult for them to fix in the riding school.