me and my girl again!

Last time I got critiqued on here people were constantly saying to get out of my horse's mouth. Well, I took some more pictures to prove to you guys that we can and almost always ride on the buckle or with little contact! We can walk, trot, and canter on the buckle. For some reason, that day that we took pictures, she just wasn't having any of it. She wouldn't listen, so I had to resort to the reins. But yeah, this is us on a normal day!
Chloe has improved so much. She went from a hallow back with her head as high as it can go to this:

No contact trot work:






Contact trot work (as you can see, it's still not a whole lot of contact):








How do we look? Btw, this was chloes last day with shoes on!

I think you two look very nice together and you fit her well. You have a beautiful lower leg position. I would work on sitting back though and not appearing as slouched. I notice you ride with your hands very far apart in a lot of the pics.. Why is that?

Also, have you taught her to work on the vertical yet? I think that's great that you do no-contact work with her, but I do think you need to establish more contact with her as well. I don't mean pulling on her face, or riding on her mouth. I understand the long rein in the no-contact pictures, but in the contact ones, you don't really appear to have that much contact. Shorten your reins a tad and don't hold them back so far to your belly (as in the first contact pic). Move your hands up a bit and give her head but still keep contact (does that make any sense?).

She is very lovely and seems to be doing well. If you haven't already started working her on the vertical, I would consider starting to do that with her, trying to get her head into frame. However, I don't really know where you are in your training with her and how much she knows, so if I am totally off-kilter just ignore me. Haha.

But overall very nice. Keep up the great work! Your horse is beautiful!

You aren't sitting up straight. Other than that, you guys look really nice. Is she considered collected? Or were you going for that?

We do hunters.
I'm not really trying to get her to carry herself on the vertical as she JUST started to carry me comfortably. She had a huge back issue. Litterally 2 months ago she would hallow her back out and carry her head as high as it could go, in any gait faster than a walk.

Now her back is sore because she's actually carrying me correctly and those muscles weren't really used before.

I don't really want her to be the type of horse that needs a lot of contact to do basic flatwork. I just want her (as of right now) to have a relaxed headset with a soft mouth that responds to a touch of rein.

I do think I'm forward a bit in some pictures, but hunters have a pretty different posture than something like... a dressage rider. This is IMO but I think the picture with the zoom/blurred effect is a good hunter upper body position.

Thanks for the input, though!