Jump to my slide-show presentation of the warm-up exercise for a round arena
A little over a year ago, I shared my favorite warm-up exercise. (See it here: Training idea # 2: An advanced warm-up exercise for your horse.) I don’t usually do it in a dressage arena, but I designed it with one in mind. I used a dressage app to make the images for my blog post. You do not need a dressage arena to do it, but you do need a rectangular space. I used to do it in my friend Melissa’s pasture, which was all the arena we had. Last summer, I moved in with my boyfriend. He has the luxury of having several arenas, but the one he was keeping weed-free and dragged was his indoor arena. It is ROUND, and about 140 feet in diameter, with a sprinkler in the middle. I ended up adapting my favorite warm-up, and after many busy months, am finally getting around to posting about my no-longer-new warm-up exercise for a round arena.
Above: The round indoor arena that inspired this exercise, with the clover leaf pattern that my boyfriend rides in clearly defined.
A round arena?
As far as I know, there is no round arena smart phone app. For one thing, people don’t do patterns in round arenas. Well… not officially. My boyfriend always rides in patterns. He has a clover-leaf style one that he repeats over and over again. Maybe I’ll blog about it at some point. My boyfriend has cutting horses. How a cutting horse moves depends on the cattle. I tend to think of this arena as a “cutting arena,” but all the cuttings I’ve seem (very few) did not take place in a round arena. They use one end of a rectangular one. In the best case scenario, the corners are rounded. But this arena is round, and it’s the one I rode in all last summer, when I first got Fantazia and was reminding her of basic training.
Because of the round arena, I’ve ended up using Power Point to make the images for this post. I recorded the presentation and exported it as a video before uploading to youtube.
Short video presentation of the round arena warm-up exercise:
If you have any ideas or questions, please leave them in the comments!
For more ways to employ a spiral at the walk, see Training idea # 5: Four spiral exercises to do at the walk.
See also my Training idea # 4: Clover-leaf exercise for a round arena
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