Lower His Neck from the Withers.

Before starting Tuesday's lesson with Sean Cunningham, owner and trainer at STC Dressage, I told him about Izzy's rear and how I had worked through it all. I was a little surprised by the follow up questions Sean asked. In my mind, I had closed the case. I had worked worked through it, and that was the end of it. Not to Sean; he wanted to probe a bit deeper, and after answering all of his questions, he suspected that we have been packaging Izzy up too much, too soon. Remember, he had most of the summer off as he recovered from two different injuries.

Not the canter, but same idea (October 22).

To test his hypothesis, Sean had me work Izzy in a forward thinking canter. He also had me work to lower Izzy's neck from the withers, something I've never thought about in the canter before. I usually work to get him rounder to lift his back, but letting him lower his neck from the withers encourages more swing.

Nothing miraculous happened, but Izzy did stretch down and open his stride a bit. Cantering with an "open frame" did give me a very new feeling though. I could feel Izzy struggling to hold his balance in this new, longer frame, but he struggled in a good way. He didn't feel so "balled up." Sean warned me about doing too much of this work though as it would eventually dump Izzy onto his forehand.

Not stretching down from the withers ... (October 22)

The entire lesson went very well. When I first started riding with Sean two and a half years ago, we had about a 15 minute window where we could work on something new before Izzy's timer went off. These days, we can work for a solid 45 minutes without Izzy checking out or having a melt down. Instead of working on Izzy, Sean is able to work on me. Once he fixes what I am doing wrong, Izzy responds instantly. It's very motivating to know that I am the problem because that can be fixed.

​Izzy might be complicated, but Sean has figured both him and me out.