Three-Second-Stop-Ana and Others

I love to see how my horses improve. Don't we all.
Aleythia and I were discussing ways we could teach Ana that standing still was a good thing and here's what we came up with.

• Have her run until she's begging to stop. Stop, and do it all over again until she stands still.
• Emphasize stopping on the ground
• One rein stops
• Turn her when she's going faster than wanted.
• Tie her up to the trailer, put on all her tack, get on and wait. When she stops moving and heaves a big sigh, put her away.

Now I'll tell you the stuff involved with each one.
The first one will involve hour after hour of riding, as she can run for half an hour, stop for 4 minutes and run another half hour. Another problem is that she will also just get more and more fit every time we do it. And the only pro I can think of is that it would probably work.
With the second one we figured that if we really emphasize what whoa means on the ground she may just get it in the saddle. We're actually testing this one out. Whenever we ask Ana to stop we will say woah when she stops, so that she will start connecting the word with the action, or lack of action.
As far as one rein stops go, Ana gets frustrated with them, so she rears. It's actually not that big of a deal. You just get right back to work after she rears. And Ana can do circles all the way down the alfalfa field. She'll figure it out eventually, and it will probably get to be less and less time every time we do it.
The fourth one is not really about stopping, just speed. But it's something we will probably do in the future.
The last one is the one we chose to try. But we did do the ground work one first. We got the idea based off of something we did with Flicka. We always had a problem with her walking off before we got on so we always got on her while she was tied to the trailer. Then when we were in the saddle we undid the halter from around her neck and went riding. We did this for months. Not because it took her that long to learn to stand still, but it was just the way we did it with her. So unintentually we taught her to stand still while we got on. When for some unknown reason we got on her in the paddock she stood still while we got on. So, taking this idea we made our reasons just a little bit different. We wanted her to learn that standing still was a good thing. Her first reaction to you getting on while she's tied to the tralier is to start pacing. Aleythia made a little modification to this idea by also teaching Ana to disengage her hindquarters when she turned (she was doing it anyway, why not give her a cue to go with it?) and saying woah after a little while of Ana's pacing. Ana would stop but then get going again. It was funny, cause Aleythia was telling me about the first time she tried this, she said that eventually when she asked Ana to stop, she stopped, heaved a BIG sigh, and just stood there.

Doing the same ground work stuff with the fillies, Santana, and Misstack. We try to keep the sessions with the fillies short. Running in circles for long amounts of time can ruin a young horse's legs. We did ground driving with Coffie. and after the first little bit of me walking in front of her and Aleythia behind, she did it without me in front. She did have a little trouble about Aleythia being behind her, but she was much easier to correct and she got over it pretty quick. She was better prepared. The flexing is probably what did it. She learned that getting off the pressure of the halter would give her a release so that's what she sought after when ground driving.
I have advanced with Santana to changing directions by pivoting on his back feet when I step in front of his shoulder. I'm doing the same thing with Misstack.