taking a page out of Ingrid's book

It's Grid Pro Quo time again! Last time, we looked at a cavalletti exercise authored by Ryan Wood, and this week we tried a new configuration by Ingrid Klimke! 

i kinda doubt we'll actually attempt ALL of these exercises.... but who knows, we'll see!

If we learn one thing from this book, it'll be how to better visualize, anticipate and.... adapt the concepts and setups to fit our needs etc. Bc.... Not gonna lie, this particular attempt was kinda a fail. 

Ingrid designed a line of three cavalletti set at angles. Sure... Superficially, the exercise looks simple and straight forward enough, plus also looks super versatile in terms of picking your lines and patterns through the various poles. 

 

sticking with the theme of "keeping it simple, stupid!"

It's basically a serpentine -- but could also be ridden as two separate circles (just catching two poles at a time), or also as a straight line (hitting each pole on an angle). 

I figured I'd mostly focus on the latter ideas, since Ingrid's idea for the serpentine was to use each cavalletti to prompt a lead change. Which... Eh, is a little above our paygrade at this point.

instructions called for cavalletti or small jumps, but, eh, ground poles were fine

The "fail" part came in realizing, after I'd set it up and gotten on, that the idea of riding each half of the serpentine as part of its own circle meant my circles would be half the width of our dressage court, since I set it up on center line. So.... canter circles about 15m. Which was a liiiiiitle smaller than I'd had in mind. 

you can see how setting this up on the diagonal (red box) allows for bigger circles than when the same exercise is set up on the center line (gray box)

If we do it again, maybe I'll try to set it up on a diagonal line so there's more room for a circle on each end of the serpentine? Or maybe I'll just set up each separate line of two poles (one at 33', the other at 44') on each quarterline? 

I actually liked the distances a lot, and could see value of just working on those sized circles off both leads. Putting the whole serpentine together for us was a little iffy just bc of the necessary lead change lol.... Anyway, the 33' section wanted 3 bending strides, and the 44' section wanted 4 bending strides. 

since the dressage ring was kinda a fail, we got our footwork patterns in with this fun little pinwheel setup

Luckily, after kinda not really getting what I wanted from that ride, our next session found us up in the jump ring where some interesting pattern-ish kinda stuff looked promising. Specifically -- see the little orange and white x-rail in the top right corner? 

There was another one around the bend immediately to the right out of frame -- making for a perfect bending line that usually came up in 5 or 6, and was kinda maybe the same-ish ideas that we had intended to practice with the Ingrid exercise. 

trainer P had set up a line of short ones too, and yes that standard snapped in half, womp. jumped it exactly as it is anyway

So I did a couple sessions off each lead, circling through, trying to get consistent, then adding in the little pinwheel set of jumps. One circuit all left leads (jump, land, loop around left, jump the next, land, loop around left, jump the next, etc etc etc), then repeated the whole thing off the right. 

Finally, when we felt like we were clicking right on along, I took a couple passes down the above grid off each lead. It's very short distances -- probably about 18' -- so maybe will help Charlie get a little snappier? 

random barrels were fun too! 

Idk lol, it was what was set up, and I didn't feel like getting off to change or move anything. So we made it work, and it was fun! 

Charlie can get a little lazy about small jumps, and I can get complacent.... So trying to do more of these cavallettti type exercises will hopefully be good practice for staying focused on the execution even when it's not like... big or scary lol.

visiting with the shetland council

I swear, tho, there is more to that Grid Pro Quo book than ground poles set on a straight line --- and we'll definitely get to some of that eventually too! 

For now, it's just nice having that book in my locker to help give me a sense of purpose and inspiration for our rides where we might otherwise kinda just dink around getting our reps in lol. 

all done! 

In the meantime, there's a couple weeks until our next planned outing so it's a good time to just play around lol. Anyone else experimenting with new and interesting exercises??