Kate Little Clinic: Day 2 - Kate Schools Pyro

September 03, 2025

Kate Little Clinic: Day 2 - Kate Schools Pyro

As foreshadowed by my last post, our lesson on Day 2 started with Kate working Pyro. I requested that she help me work on his balance and self carriage while finding gaps in my riding/training since I've done all the work with Pyro myself.

Photos are a mixture from Jen, Liz, and my own Pivo screenshots. They've honestly all blended together (whoops!), so if they look nice, I likely have those ladies to thank!

Before she got on, she did what I'll call "bit work" on the ground. This bit work has 2 main purposes: to educate the horse to the cues that will be used under saddle and help them relax tension in their poll/jaw/etc. prior to the ride. Kate likened it to a yoga sun salutation for the horse. This is really difficult for me to articulate without a visual, but I'll do my best:

Touch the bit without asking for anything and observe what they do. (Cheek pieces of the bridle should continue to lay flat against the side of their face.)
Elevate, first your body language by taking a deep breath and drawing your posture up tall, then both sides of the bit. Ideally, the horse will rock their weight back and lift their thoracic sling. At bare minimum, they need to carry the weight of their own head. If they lean, gently vibrate the bit up. (Pyro liked to push forward in particular, kinda snaking his head like a crocodile cruising in the water.)
Ask for lateral flexion, where they keep their head in front of their chest and bend continuously through their neck and poll. Start by fixing one side of the bit in space, and gently vibrating up on the side of the bit you want them to bend towards, just like you would in the saddle. If they don't respond, rhythmically rock the bit in the direction you want them to bend, releasing when they soften and bend. On a more schooled horse, you can increase the difficulty by asking them to slowly come back to center before releasing.
Vibrate the bit up in both hands until the horse's profile is horizontal to the ground. Again, they should carry their own weight. Look for the horse to work their jaw BOTH ways, and for their tongue to stick straight out of their mouth. (With Pyro, his first jaw movements were quite *crunchy*, then he worked through it. When his jaw moved freely both ways, it was like it drew a figure 8 from my point of view.

Pyro tried to back up instead of bend because it was difficult for him.

After talking me through that, Kate swung a leg over and proceeded to put Pyro through his paces. I wish I could've tapped into the stream of consciousness through her ride, since she focused solely on him and not narrating to us.

I recognized the warm-up sequence she guided us through the day before. What I noticed as she took him through the slaloms, serpentines, and leg yields was that she was FAR more adept at keeping his head in one position.

*mlem*

Once through the warm up, I could tell she was trying to encourage him to elevate his thoracic sling while bringing his hind end further under him. (Pyro likes to live his life parked out, paying homage to his morgan roots.) As they proceeded to canter, she required that he step under himself nicely into the canter, rather than surging forward as he typically does.

In this photo, I can hear her saying, "yeah, that IS harder than cantering, isn't it?", as he did a VERY collected trot.

Who knew he could sit and be fancy??!

She definitely pushed some buttons, and Pyro had *feelings* about the difficult tasks she was asking for.

Um...

...Sir.

You'll have to use your imagination to fill in the GRUNTING he did while dolphining.

Back to being polite

She ended on one of the most quiet, balanced, collected canters I've ever seen Pyro do. As Kate passed him off to me, she had several notes:

I have a "dead zone" just in front of my left hip. She deduces that I figure out what he's doing with his body there based on context clues from other parts of his body.
In lateral work, I need less bend. In straight work, I need more bend.
We need to work on neck extension (a known issue). As this skill progresses, I should be able to ask for neck extension in low, medium, and high head positions (high being the most difficult).

She instructed me on how to cue with the bit in a clear way that Pyro understood quickly:

To pick up his ears (and eventually thoracic sling), vibrate my hands upward.
To ask him to reach down, apply steady pressure until I feel him press into the bit, they give down and forward with my hands, allowing him to reach.
When bending, vibrate just the inside hand up, while giving with the outside hand to allow the bend.
Between these cues, I am to return to "neutral". Transitioning from vibrating upward pressure straight into steady upward pressure, without neutral hands in between, makes it confusing for the horse.

Once that was laid out, she asked me to take Pyro through the prior day's warm up by myself, saying she'd try not to interject too much, allowing me to get a feel for things.

Pyro immediately overreacted to my "soft" cue when I picked up the reins. Obviously, Kate was much softer, and he let me know it. I'm going to have to do a lot of introspection during my rides going forward to try and recalibrate what "soft" is.

Deb made the comment that Pyro visibly relaxed once "his" human was back in the saddle.

Trying to figure out asking for bend and balance through the serpentines

The next thing I noticed was that I was more able to keep his head at one level after Kate's training ride. I need to develop my awareness of where his head is. As I focused on other aspects of our lesson, I was often ignorant of when his ears dipped lower.

I had my game face on while Pyro served some mean side eye to the audience.

Finding moments I can soften and make it feel good to Pyro when he does what I ask.

Ears up!

I'm pretty sure you can see the smoke coming out of my ears as I try to internalize this feeling.

While there were definitely times Pyro opened his mouth during the warm up, a lot of it coincided with me asking him to do something hard. The clear cues Kate coached (say that 5 times fast) me through obviously made sense to him, because I COULD ask him to change his balance and reach out into the contact. It was a data point in favor of the single-jointed snaffle.

My pretty boy

What am I doing with my hands? The world may never know.

After the warm up routine, Kate instructed me to take him on a big figure 8, using the entire arena. We played with several variations:

Keeping 1 bend on both halves of the figure 8, swapping from true bend to counterbend and vice versa
Shoulder in on one circle to haunches out on the other half of the figure 8
Shoulder out to haunches in, then transitioning up to canter
Haunches out to haunches in, then canter

All along, I was incorporating the bend and balance work from the warm up.

Giving through the jaw, but dropped the ears

Got the ears up, but not the bend

Starting to incorporate canter, a bit strung out at first

Continuing to develop the balance

Finding a little more collection in the canter

By the end, we found this incredible canter that felt balanced and effortless. I had never experienced that kind of canter from Pyro. I was grinning from ear to ear at this magical feeling.

All smiles

It felt like I was seeing a new side of Pyro and what our rides together could be.

I couldn't believe the difference even from the day prior. It was inspiring to see what Kate could ask of him, and she helped me set the bar for us a little higher... while feeling like I have the tools to reach that level. I came out of the lesson feeling confident in myself, my young horse, and the training tools at my disposal. I also fell a bit more in love with my (sometimes difficult, FORESHADOWING) homebred boy.