Tried the TTouch.....

So today I got the book recommended by Danielle, the speaker at the Tellington Touch demo last week. It's called Know Your Horse Inside Out by Sarah Fisher. It has a section all about how to assess your horse and identify where he has tense areas, isn't quite straight, may be a bit stiff etc, then the second half has detailed explainations of how to do the bodywork (the different massages) and groundwork (quite a lot of that we do already, getting them to go over or bend round poles, over wood, plastic etc) and there are lots of case studies in there too. I can recommend it, a very interesting read and available on Amazon for about a fiver at the moment.....

This afternoon I decided to try some of this out with Gandalf. I started off with the "clouded leopard" touch on the top of his neck and along his back (video of how to do that here). This seemed to go down well. Then I tried the ear touch, now normally he doesn't like having his ears touched, the first time he flinched away as usual but the second time he kept still so he obviously was OK with it. You hold the base of the ear and stroke along the ear to the tip, then you do tiny circles with the tip of the ear between thumb and forefinger. When I started, the tips of his ears were cold, after a few goes, they warmed up. So I guess the circulation improved.....

Then I did some mane lifts all down his neck, you take a section of mane at the base, lift it and rotate it a few times, then slide along to the end of the mane. This occasioned some licking and chewing.....

Finally I tried the Python Lift on his legs, we were shown this at the demo.

This seemed to go down well too, and afterwards, he yawned a few times and dozed off.....

Will definitely be doing this some more......  :-)