Angel looks ahead to a winter of dressage

This month has been a fun one; we've been concentrating on a lot of dressage training and have decided that dressage is going to be our thing over the tough winter months that are ahead! 

Tom Tom was sent on a dressage boot camp earlier on in the month with Sonia (our dressage coach) to work hard while I was away from a few days.  Since then we have been practicing lots on our canter transitions as this is something we both struggle with during competitions. When I went to my last dressage competition, although Tom was super and came 2nd, the transitions were what let us down as he can fall into them rather then staying elevated in his frame. We have been practicing our dressage at least 4 times a week and have also done some lovely hacks to keep his fitness up in preparation for dressage and perhaps a bit of winter showjumping to!

Tom Tom and I have also been training in the technical side of showjumping.  As he is so big and I am so little, practicing harder turns and balancing over the jumps has benefited us both.  I taught Tom to listen to me and I then respond to him quicker. The last couple of months I haven't competed as often as I would have liked, much of this has been down to time pressures, so I made the decision to take some time from competing to focus on dressage to get the little mistakes corrected so that those extra marks could be added on.  Over the next two weeks we will be out and competing now we are finally starting to get everything together!  

Our aims over the winter are to compete at novice and and hopefully progress to medium.  We are going to join BD and see where our journey takes us.  With the practice we have been putting in he is really starting to pick himself up, this has made a huge difference to how he goes and something we'll be continuing to work on.

So for now it's been all about preparation - hopefully next month we will have some winning stories to tell! 

Angel