I've watched Marijke's videos where she works with some other
people's horses and it seems to me that she is moving with the basic
ST exercises quite fast. Sometimes she starts to work on shoulder-in
on the very first day. On the other hand, I've seen her work with
some extremely crooked horses veeery slowly, even slower than I work
with Karina. And now I'm not sure whether Karina's way of moving
justifies my extreme caution. In fact she is sometimes able to move
with her head forward-down in trot and canter even, she doesn't put
too much weight on her front legs, she is able to engage her haunches
and free the shoulders - a little, of course, but the improvement may
come in time. What worries me actually, is that there exists some
visible stiffnes in one of the hind legs and that Karina is
diagonally imbalanced. Her left front leg is also more developed, her
left shoulder is much bigger than the right one. There are problems
with the lateral bend, because on the longe she often moves to the
left and is bent to the right, with her right side muscles tense and
hollow and she should be moving with her righ side long and round. I
have worked with her on long reins, but that doesn't work exactly as
I wished, because when the outside rein is behind her haunches, she
keeps on hurting her mouth with every step. But when the outside rein
is thrown across her back it really works fine and prevents her from
falling out through her outside shoulder. But then it doesn't prevent
the hips from falling out, and even the wall of the roundpen is not
enough. Before I bought Karina, she in fact has never worked on the
longe properly, and she never walked on the longe to the right at all. The former owner told me that she
didn't want to go to the right, so he never forced her to. But she
soon learned that she can move to the right also (I didn't force her,
too - I just asked a few steps at first, then one circle, then
another and another), though there are still problems with the
bending and so on, but I don't expect them to magically disappear
after so many long years that causing them took. It is wonderful that
I finally found in the meanders of the Internet materials, which
explained to me so much and helped me to name and define the problem.
Because how could I work on a problem if I didn't know what it
actually was?
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