Working with young horses means dealing with frequent shying. After two years of near-daily work under saddle, True is only now beginning to be more trustworthy in terms of shying,...
Question courtesy of Curtis Pool. This is a very complicated question as there are so many different points of view when it comes to teaching people to ride. As a...
At first glance, the Olympic Training Center might seem a long way from the neighborhood swimming pool, skating rink, or riding school. It’s not as distant as you’d think. Even...
True and I don’t take much time off during the winter because doing so requires so much re-conditioning in spring. Time spent re-conditioning during the riding season is time stolen...
This is very straightforward to me. As a trainer, I think too many of us are scared of their owners/clients. Horses don’t have to do all that they do for...
Whether you’re eating healthier, taking up daily meditation, or embracing ‘Dry January,’ the New Year is all about self-improvement. But it’s not just people who can benefit from methodically implemented,...
Ground manners in any horse are very important and often overlooked. Why? First, they transfer to mounted work. A horse who’s been taught to pay attention to you, follow your...
My green Warmblood True and I have been experiencing a lot of snow lately and don’t have an indoor. We manage to walk on long hilly driveways, practice lateral maneuvers...
It was snowing and blowing yesterday, so my young Warmblood True got the day off and I worked on a photo gift for my father. This required sorting through 170...
Sometimes the hardest part of horse training is training the human. This problem shows up in many ways—we humans often reward at the wrong moment, apply different cues at once,...
It astounds me how little I know about the horse world. I have been involved with horses my whole life, though almost entirely on the English side of things and...
With the help of a grande vanilla latte, I like to get to barns early for lameness exams. I watch the sunrise, observe horses in pastures, ask questions about feeding,...
Two years ago, I had just purchased my then-three-year-old Warmblood True. He’d been with me for three months, and I took him to a small schooling show just to ride...
Fear, rising prices, and the pressure to maintain an adequate work/life/sport balance is leaving many amateur equestrians feeling the burn. So how do you know if it’s time to hit...
Brain-based horsemanship makes a person pretty skeptical about what horses do and don’t “like.” Without a prefrontal cortex that can evaluate and judge, horse brains are left to innate instincts...
What makes a chestnut horse a chestnut? I have written about roans, palominos, bays and Appaloosas and today I thought I’d add to the collection and talk about chestnuts. Chestnuts...
Innovation in the 21st century has reshaped society in ways good, bad, and largely still unknown. In addition to rapid gene sequencing (good!), AI (terrifying!), and space travel (we’ll get...
