Video Training

For a Christmas present my mother bought a video consultation training series from a trainer I admire, Jamie Novak from Brainerd Minnesota. We have just now gotten started on the consultation series and are doing our second session tomorrow. I will be posting what she says and my videos here to remind myself as well as see what you all think.

For our first session she asked to see him walk, jog and lope both directions and just do a normal training session on him. Here's the video.



Jamie stated that I have wonderful hands and seat. What do you think? Bogey takes a lot of leg to ride so sometimes you can see my legs doing strange things.

On the Bogey front, she feels that he is in need of hock injections. She felt he looked sore and his mouth gaping/refusals were a direct link to the soreness. This makes complete sense, he was campaigned as a lunge liner and futurity horse, so it seems he is just asking for the injections.

She liked his "throughness" and how bridled up he was. She thought he had hollowness issues and his back needed to be lifted as well as taking the neck line down lower.

Jamie doesn't like forehand turns at all, and feels that they are only good for a horsemanship pattern. She stated that they push a horse down onto their forehand too much. I was doing the forehand turns to have him gain awareness of his hindquarters (they are so far away from his brain) and reach. I like to be able to have my horse be very handy and be able to do it all. I'm going to lay off the turns but still keep them in my back pocket, just because I'd like my horse to have the knowledge and abilities.

Some suggestions on tack Jamie gave were to use draw reins on him and a medium twist bit. For the exercises she wanted us to do serpentines, donut shapes and piaffes like movements as well as using walking pivots and some stop pivots.

Well what do you think? What should we work on? Any recommendations, tips or tricks?