Posts from February 2012

by Lori Albrough

Last month we talked about some stretches to loosen the chest muscles to help you improve your posture on the horse. Shoulders that are rounded forward and downward are often being pulled in by tight chest muscles. Once you have loosened up your chest muscles, you can start to strengthen the muscles of your back that support both good posture and good riding.

Three back exercises I like to use are the Bent Over Forward Raise, Bent Over Reverse Fly, and the Bent Over Row. These work the mid-back muscles and the muscles along the spine. Today I will talk about the first exercise, but first, in order to perform them properly we need to master the correct training posture.

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by Lori Albrough

Everyone is asking “What breed of horse was that featured on ABC’s The Bachelor?” Yes, it was a Fjord horse!

In the episode where they go to Lindzi’s parents horse farm in Ocala, FL, the couple goes for a carriage drive pulled by a Fjord gelding called Devon.

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by Lori Albrough

A while back I was in this seven week program on creativity, and on day one they started off by presenting us with a challenge. It was a contract to sign, and the contract said that for the forty-nine day duration, we would commit to totally giving up the following:

Complaining, Criticizing, Gossiping, and Whining.

Whoa! Stop and think about that for a moment.

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by Lori Albrough

I remember way back in January 2005, Dressage Today magazine had an article called “Closing the Gap” with the tagline: When will “North-American bred” have the same cachet as “Imported from Europe”. The article was geared towards sporthorse breeding and training, and quoted Scott Hassler who said:

“Our good horses are not given the chance to compete against Europe’s good horses because of the training. It’s that simple. We need to get our young horses ridden better.”  In particular, Hassler says, “Our young horses are not ridden in a way that is safe, competent, or marketable. We see them in a very strung out frame. They don’t canter for the first time for six or eight months.”

That last sentence is the one I want to focus on. I believe that once your horse starts his formal under-saddle training, whether that is at three years or four years old, he needs to be taught to canter from the beginning.

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by Lori Albrough

Training straightness in your horse is important. So important, in fact, that “Straightness” rates it’s very own place on the training scale, right up there at the tippy-top underneath “Collection”. So it’s both a very advanced concept, and at the same time, very fundamental.

If we are not aware of, and working towards correcting, our horse’s intrinsic crookedness from the very beginning, we are in effect training his imbalances, reinforcing his crookedness, and making it more firmly entrenched.

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by Lori Albrough

Sometimes it’s hard not to bring your day (or your week!) with you into your interaction with your horse. You get to the barn and the irate customers, looming projects, unreasonable co-workers, and that cop who pulled you over for speeding on the way, well, they all show up with you! And maybe as your horse comes face to face with this vortex of mixed feelings, he starts giving you even more challenges to cope with!

So, I want to share with you a four-step process I have learned, that you can use before going into a situation with your horse. By following this simple process of setting intention, or mini-intention as I call it, you will change from being in a reactive position to instead creating the situation that you would prefer to have.

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