Me and Gypsy had a breakthrough! I am not kidding you, Gypsy has still not changed in the slightest, he still wants to go 100MPH in everything, that's never going to change in the slightest, and is still excitable, but in the last 2 weeks something has changed.
Gypsy will do collected work willingly! I am seriously worried about his health. Gypsy shuns all collected work, lateral work, anything that stops him going 100MPH is evil in his mind and to be avoided.
That changed last Saturday. Towards the end of the lesson, where we hadn't done too much work, but some recent canter work had got Gypsy up on his toes, we were given the all-clear to do lateral work with the horses we were riding. This normally results in a 10 minute battle to get Gypsy to do a leg-yield, not last Saturday. He willingly performed leg-yield, and then, deciding that this lateral work malarkey was getting him lots of praise from yours truely, did 2 very nice shoulder-ins and even gave me a couple of steps of half-pass, which I asked for not really expecting anything. OK his half-pass wouldn't exactly set the Dressage world alight, but it's a start.
This Saturday, we were doing quarter turns to prepare for shoulder-in. Again, Gypsy was worryingly willing to do this work all nice and collected.
There is a catch to this though - once he discovered the joys of collection, he decided that he liked it so much, he didn't really want to go forward again!
