Training with teddy

I am so happy Teddy is back. He has been back for about a week and a half from his sojourn in Alberta. Emily is having so much fun on him, feeling bold and brave, working on transitions, cantering, and riding bareback too. She deserves this so much, to feel safe and comfortable and practice her skills. He is a great horse for her to achieve her Rider Levels for high school credits. 
I am practicing and expanding my training, too. I have been taking Teddy in the back forest behind the barn, the 150 acre park land. We start out in an easy walk to warm up. After ten minutes of walking, we warm up doing trot circles around a tree. There is a significant hill at the back of the property so it gives us a chance to warm up until we get there. I have been trotting and cantering him up the hill to get him using his hind quarters. It is both strength and cardio training. We extend the distance every time we go. When we get to the top, we slow down, turn around and walk down the hill so he uses his core to support himself. We turn around and canter up again. We repeat this interval training with hill work 3-4 times.   After hill work, we do intervals of walk and trot home. We have Atlas with us and Teddy likes to race him so we have to practice WHOA or he will gallop at full speed all the way home to win the race. It’s so much fun to use natural obstacles and features to work on interval training and transitions. It feels like a natural progression from where we left off a year ago, I am feeling engaged by the new challenge of working in wild terrain and it’s keeping him fit so he can do some jumping with Emily in the Spring.