Coquin - march 24, 2009

Aside of my current investigations about warm vs. cold characters, I have a stimulating discussion with 'Ecuyere Professeur' whose blog is referenced on this one. She is very cautious about the use of 'pushing forward' cold horses as a means to overcome resistances. She rightly points out that their are several categories of 'cold' horses, the main ones being natural cold, i.e. lack of blood on the one side, and acquired coldness due to boredom on the other hand. She makes the point that pushing forward upon contractions might be detrimental. A lot of good thoughts indeed.
So I tried to use her views with Coquin. He definitely has blood from his good origins, and can deliver excellent behaviour as we have seen earlier. We started with a long walk session, first in full relaxation with soft flexions; he soon lowered his neck with nose down, which was good to see and feel. More collected work followed, with very small circles (horse length diameter), shoulder-ins, haunches out on large circles, half-pass, halts and backward on three steps. Coquin was very good on all this, as usual. Then at posting trot, I aimed at getting a steady placer with good cadence. Here I had to push him forward from time to time, because I saw no other way to get steadiness with ramener. Lots of speed changes and transitions to walk.
Canter session was ok. I used circles to adjust his placer.
As a conclusion, it was a fair session. I tried hard not to use to much 'pushing forward', but had to at times. My disappointment is that I could not steady his trot enough to have real collected work in lightness at this gait. I have had it before, with stronger preliminary forward pushing, and as I said, B. gets it very well. So I still have to dig further into the right approach for Coquin, apart from sheer strong 'mise en avant' which Ecuyere does not like...