In my last lesson, Hayley explained how to do a canter half pass correctly. I now know how to do the movement correctly in my head but I am still struggling to do it correctly on Razz I think it is the balance between the different aids. For half pass to the right:

• Use the left leg to get Razz to to move laterally to the right
• but do not use it too strongly or too far back because then Razz swings his quarters to the right and I end up with quarters to the right and bend to the right (very strange!!!)
• Hayley says that at this stage she would prefer to see quarters trailing slightly but Razz must have the correct bend
• I am therefore very concious of not using the left leg too strongly but it does need to be there to generate the lateral movement
• Use the right leg & right rein to get Razz to bend in the direction of the lateral movement
• these are the aids I find difficult because they are aids that are “against” the direction of lateral movement
• Razz does not want to easily bend in the direction of the lateral movement so they need to be fairly strong aids but that feels strange to me because it is against the direction of lateral movement that I am creating with the other leg
• The right half pass must have right bend so this aid is important

This all gets even more difficult when Hayley gets me to do leg yield across the diagonal and then change it into half pass at X. There is a lot going on in this exercise and changing the bend and aids and using all the aids correctly at X needs practice. However, I think that practice is improving our half pass – particularly my understanding of how to apply the aids correctly and the relative strength of each of the aids.

The video was recorded with an unmanned camera towards the end of a very grey winters day. The camera has actually accurately captured the day but it does look a grey The zooms are done in editing software and so at high zooms the image gets very pixelated even though the camcorder is hi-definition. This video is not representative of the quality of videos that I produce commercially.