The Ideal Bit For A Newbie Horse Rider

December 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Communication is a significant part of our lifestyles and is the major part of our experiences with horses. The standard of communication between rider and pony establishes the quality of the ride.

I believe each beginner should start pony riding with a ‘solid’ bit with no leverage. The solid (aka pelum) bit is way more understanding and forgiving of the beginner rider compared with the snaffle bit. If misused by the beginner, the solid bit is less likely to confuse the horse. The snaffle is multi-dimensional and better utilised by experienced riders.

I have come across many brand new students who become absolutely disoriented because of the volume of info given to them all at the same time. Ideally, you want to keep things simple with a beginner student regardless of if progress is slow. It is vital that the student receives adequate info to help him make a stress free relationship with his horse as soon as possible.

When you employ a solid bit with no leverage or possibly a bosal for that matter, you are left with a one hand riding opportunity, since it takes just one hand to operate these effectively; an ideal situation for a newbie.

I have come across many new scholars who become totally disoriented thanks to the volume of info given to them all at the same time. Ideally, you need to keep things simple with a beginner student regardless of if progress is slow. It is imperative that the student receives adequate info to help him make a calm relationship with his horse straight away.

When you utilise a solid bit with no leverage maybe a bosal for that matter, you are left with a one hand riding opportunity, since it takes only one hand to operate these bits effectively; a perfect situation for a beginner.

Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers visit HorseHorses

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Identifying Thrush In Your Pony

December 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Thrush is a medical condition caused by bacterial invasion of the bottoms of pony feet. It can attract both front and back soles and is in general caused by excessive exposure to moisture.

Horses that are basically restricted to stalls or to little enclosed areas are rather more subject to thrush. Moist conditions make for excellent breeding areas for bacteria.

If you have a horse that is mostly confined, make sure to carry out inspections of and totally clean out your horse’s feet each day. You should also engage in healthy stable management practices. On the top of the daily to do list is keeping the stable clean and dry.

Thrush symptoms generally are comprised of the leaking of a black, tarry kind of material from the horse’s feet, accompanied by a nasty pong. The frog and surrounding tissue (the grooves on the side of and down the frog’s middle) are rendered soft and brittle by thrush. When thrush is permitted to progress, the heel starts splitting and bleeding. Thrush is deeply painful, and can be a total debilitating experience.

Comparatively mild cases of thrush can be easily cured with some assistance from a farrier. Treatment should be began immediately on identification, as the hoof deteriorates badly if the illness is permitted to build untreated, to the extent that the horse can go permanently lame.

If your horse is a victim of an advanced stage of thrush, you will need the services of both of your farrier and your veterinarian. They will need to debride all affected areas and get rid of as much diseased tissue as they can. Tissue removal of this sort could be accompanied by copious bleeding if the disease is fairly advanced, so it isn’t a sight for weak hearts. If the frog’s center cleft area is affected severely, you must clean it out each day and apply medication and cotton padding, be certain to implement the instructions of your farrier and veterinarian.

With some dedicated care, it’s possible to get your horse back to full health.

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How To Develop Soft Hands For Horse Riding

December 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Having soft hands while riding is one of the ultimate horseback goals, and the biggest beneficiary will be your pony. In the tips in this article, I introduce you to some simple but fun physical and mental exercises which will assist you in achieving soft hands.

The 2 physical exercises are described first.

1. Tie two lengths of reins to a powerful fence. Ropes or even baling twine will do rather than the reins. Hold them like you would hold reins. With each hand, take up contact of not less than 10 pounds. Soften your arms to adjust the reins, weights. Move to 5 pounds from 10, return to 10 and then move again to 2 pounds. Get used to the sense of weight changes on your reins. When you are talented at it, you can carry this technique over to your riding if you feel that you are getting a bit too strong.

2. This exercise has to do with relaxation. It’s a part of your physiology that the tighter you tense any muscle, the deeper it relaxes on release. Get your strong hands tired, real tired. Make fists of your hands with the reins held in them. Clench your muscles and pile on the strain until your arms begin to shake. Relax and release the stress. Repeat several times a day, and shortly you can bring about muscle relaxation without doing the tightening routine first.

It’s time now for the mental training. We use imagery for our purposes.

1. Persuade yourself that you are holding highly vulnerable baby birds in your fists, not the reins. Just a little of additional pressure and you crush the fledglings. It is very important that you work your imagination with great clarity. Think: what sort of bird are you holding? What’s its body color and its beak’s color , what does the feeling of its feathers remind you about? What do you really think it is trying to convey with its chirping?

2. Make believe you are gripping an egg in each of your fists. If you squeeze a touch too much, you are going to need to clean up the mess you create!

3. Pretend that you’re on horseback, with no bridle. You are holding only a silk thread that leads to the horse’s mouth. Even bearing that in mind your pony responds to the very lightest of touches.

4. Think of the bit in your horse’s mouth as a razor blade. You need to be as sensitive as a master surgeon or you will finish up cutting the horse’s mouth.

All this imagery function to launch you off on your quest for soft hands. The most acceptable images you can conceive of is really personal. Think about a soft hands image what jells with you. Keep visualizing it whenever you can, whether you are on horseback or off.

Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers www.horsehorses.net/

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How To Hobble Your Horses

December 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By teaching your horse to stand hobbled, you prepare yourself, and your horse, for possible awkward circumstances where there is nowhere to tie the pony. This can regularly occur on ranches, where hobbling is very generally used as it eliminates the risks of tying a horse by the reins or the bridle.

You teach your horse to remain still hobbled by teaching him the right responses to pressure. One of the most helpful lessons you can teach your horse is to yield to pressure. You achieve this by taking your pony to a round pen or an arena. Curl a rope round his ankle and permit him to drag it for some time.

Once he is fairly used to the rope, you can start lifting his leg utilizing the rope. Different horses react in a different way to this move. Some horses show a reaction while others stay indifferent.

Try also to pick up each of your horse’s 4 feet using the rope, obviously one at a time. This way, you are teaching him to stay calm if he ever gets tangled up in fencing or wiring. He shouldn’t be panicking if he’s received proper lessons in yielding to pressure. The basic concept is to get him to yield to whatever position he could find himself in when pressure is applied. Once yielding is just about automatic for him, you can hobble him without causing him to panic.

During the initial few attempts at hobbling him, he is certain to fumble around and trip up a bit. He could even take a tumble. Don’t let this upset you. It is a part of the process of getting him used to hobbles that constrain his capability to move. If he does fall, just undo the hobble with care and help him back to his feet. A pony well used to pressure won’t show much of an inclination to panic as he learns to accept pressure on the legs.

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Begin Your Pony Training From The Ground

December 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It helps no end with your handling of a horse when you know just what makes him tick. In so many different ways, horses share human characteristics on smaller scales: they are individualistic, they’re perceptive, they’re stubborn, and they’re sensitive. When you base your approach on your recognition of these facts, you won’t go wrong.

Reach out to the horse with language of assurance, not language of threats. You will achieve far better results infinitely quicker. You will be surprised at just how much a horse can reciprocate good will. I think that good vibrations between a person and a horse begin from the 1st instant of the first meeting, right on the ground, long before the man gets astride the horse. I really like to call it the Ground Control.

So many folks who’ve observed me at work and listened to my propound on ground control presume that I am just referring to ground work different words. I don’t agree. Ground work has developed into a much overused term, used in so many contexts it has lost its original meaning. Ground control believes in beginning on the ground with the 1st act of putting on a halter and a lead; and progressing really slowly. The guiding concept behind ground control is that each step forward should not only boost the horse’s skills and responsiveness, it should also strengthen the trust and warmth between rider and horse.

In my days as a beginner, I fairly often heard that you had to have the ‘feel’ for handling horses. Much as I attempted, I could never latch onto what exactly ‘feel’ meant. I asked lots of individuals, and not one of them had a convincing answer. I knew it didn’t refer to physical feel, so clearly the connotation was psychological. Soon, I figured out that it meant sensitivity to the horse. I preferred the word ‘touch’ that I heard somewhere else. It seemed to describe things better, because I learned that there was a good touch to which horses responded well, as well as to a light touch, and there was also a horrid touch and a heavy touch which they did not react favourably to. For a considerable time now, I have extolled the advantages of employing a ‘good light touch’ with horses.

A good light touch is when you use something perhaps even lighter than what’s commonly referred to as feather touch. A good light touch depends as much on the sort of virtually mystic expectation that total understanding brings as on physical or oral cues and commands. Ever seen professional riders steering their horses at the more top-notch shows? Ever spotted the indisputable fact that their horses seem to respond to no cues at all (as if they actually read the minds of their riders) and are nearly always spot on? That kind of nearly peculiar coordination is the result of a superbly coordinated pony and rider and a light touch that isn’t really visible or audible to onlookers.

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Being In Synch With Your Pony

December 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve written about balance many times, but I continue to keep getting a lot of questions about this subject. I am always pleased to assist , so here I go again.

In the context of the rider, balance is derived from the saddle and the rider’s seat. As far as I can see, most folks seem to have issues understanding balance purely because they consider themselves to be too smart for the saddle. They forget the saddle as it exists has evolved over centuries of designing, redesigning, tinkering and refining. Over the centuries, it has been made to evolve to a structure now that permits the rider to neatly mesh with his horse’s motion.

The saddle has its own particular function, so let it satisfy that function. You do yourself a large disfavor, and your horse a far bigger one, by sitting in the saddle in any way apart from how you were meant to. When positioned correctly, you synch your centre of balance with that of the pony neatly, so the horse does not feel additional stress or discomfort.

When you are on the saddle, your shoulders should be upright and back. Your ankle hip and shoulder should be in a straight line. The stirrups are not for bracing yourself, they are for expediting lateral balance; this implies you have just the balls of the feet within the stirrups.

Good riders are never tense or controlling; they achieve perfect balance by staying loosely relaxed. When you get uptight, your state communicates itself to the pony, which also loses its cool. It’s best, of course, that you don’t start this cycle.

Stay relaxed with the head up, eyes forward and mind projecting ahead. Avoid looking at the back of your horse’s head or at his withers. This kind of behaviour makes them very nervous. What you actually should be doing is to radiate stability and confidence by looking miles ahead through your horse’s ears. Just this simple act will help to keep your horse confident and trusting in you. When you’re projecting positivism, you are telling your horse that there’s no need to be afraid of anything in the environment. You have scanned it and done with it, and now you are looking out into the distance ahead.

Be loose and elastic of wrist, elbow and shoulder. You should open yourself to constant learning, and as you learn and maximise feel and contact, you are also learning how to flex with your horse’s neck movement backwards and forwards in synchronicity with the body’s movement.

The horse’s ears should serve as your forward line of sight. By looking out over that angle, you project control and confidence; you are telling the pony there is nothing to be scared of. There is another benefit to looking out over the ears: you can judge where the horse himself is looking. This makes you more alert to whatever your pony might be looking at, and that will tell you what your horse’s possible reaction might be. The pony uses his ears to telegraph his impression of the threat potential of whatever he is looking at. Keep a close watch on your horse’s head movements, follow his line of sight, pick up on whatever he’s looking at and prepare for all contingencies. When you learn how to forecast your horse’s reactions accurately, you get the advantage in warding off any negative response. Although I’m repeating myself, I will emphasise this: your easiest way to handle recalcitrant horses is the standard of your emotions.

By watching out for these signals, you gain the poise and approach that will help you grasp the entire picture quickly.

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How Mental Exercises Boost Your Horse Riding Competitive Edge

December 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Like all life’s endeavours, horse riding performance can be seriously inhibited by fear in the rider’s mind. Over my years of effort to boost my horse riding talents, I have learned the hard way that unless you work out your mind with the same energy you manage to work out your body, you are not going to achieve everything you’d like to.

The rider has a serious mental exercise menu to select from: anchoring, induction of inventive state, psychological rehearsal, using affirmations to eradicate limiting beliefs, perpetual positioning and reframing, just to name a few. There’s an exercise regimen available to almost every single rider. Most riders, though, follow their own mixture of strategies. Here are ten confidence builders for riders.

1. Accept yourself

Realize you are good enough just the way that you are, speaking raw material wise, as there is always scope for improvement in the best of riders. But the essential you have everything wanted to make a great horse rider. And by the way, that goes for your horse, too. He is fine just as he is.

2. Rehearse in the mind

Across the entire world, sportsmen use this technique to condition themselves. They imagine themselves in action, and fine tune every step as they go through the competitive process. They are able to achieve marked improvements in performance this way.

3.Use anchors

Anchors are triggers that create a desired mental condition. While riding, for instance, the simple act of touching your thumb to your index finger while the reins are in your hand might be the anchor that boosts your confidence in the saddle.

4. Maintain a journal

You can gain a lot by maintaining a very regularly updated private journal. When you feel low, you can refer back to your previous glory days to remind yourself that you still have it in you. Frequently, great accomplishments follow spells of depression.

5. Hypnosis

Never undervalue the potency of suggestion. It can work wonders with the sub-conscious. Suggestion is an absolutely essential tool for any person in any field of enterprise.

6. Be thankful

Show some gratitude for all that you have in life, for all of your past achievements and for all the great things that your life has in it. Be grateful for the positives, however big or little they are.

7. Set goals

When you set goals, you are giving yourself something to aim at. You’ve got something tangible to work for, something which will tell you at any point whether you are going the correct way or the wrong one. Don’t be afraid to shoot for the stars. You can land on the moon, and that is something not everyone can boast of.

8. Reframing

By reframing, you settle on what significance an event has for you and how you’ll respond to it on the emotional front. After every competitive event, you can instantly focus on everything that went well, while leaving the errors for later analysis. This is an about turn from our normal tendency to focus on our errors, while ignoring the uplifting fact that we did far more things right than we did wrong. It is an disposition that blinds us up on our own capabilities.

9. Throw off limiting beliefs

Every human being has some very inflexible ideas of himself or herself. We like to think we know ourselves, our capabilities, our limitations. As riders, we have set ideas about riding, horses, trainers, farriers, vets, diets, events, in short , everything connected with riding. We are so set in our ways of thinking we often ignore contrary fact by hiding our heads in the sand. When things go bad, we look for scapegoats: our horses, our gear, the arenas, the weather. We fail to aim the finger at the biggest culprit: we ourselves.

10. Identify your unique style

Your ability to learn and keep, to gain mastery over new talents is directly proportional to your mind’s fitness. The efficiency with which you pursue your ambitions on both the physical and mental fronts is pretty much reliant on the quality of your minds condition.

Get going with your mental conditioning regime today. Getting mentally fit is approached the same as getting physically fit. You work on your mind muscles every day, methodically and with energy. Know yourself, and develop your strong points.

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Horse Riding Adventures: Las Vegas

December 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Like practically everyone, you probably associate Vegas with clockless casinos and never-ending money flow. But do you know that Vegas also offers some wickedly entertaining horse riding programs? If you have ever hankered to get some firsthand experience of what the Wild West was all about, you can’t do much better than go for a horse riding package in Las Vegas. You can make a choice from a range of packages that last from one day to a couple of weeks. You can also get a package customized for you.

It is time to discover that Vegas is a lot more than merely the strip, roulette wheels, cards, dice and keno.

You will find horse riding operations practically all over Las Vegas and its immediate environs. There are tours that suit every single person. You’ll find most of what you are looking for here, from tours over highly scenic landscapes operated by family controlled and managed ranches to stunning Grand Canyon tours right on the border with Nevada. Vegas gives you exposure to terrain and trails that you won’t find elsewhere. You can take part in tours that give you all sorts of accommodation from simple tents to more fancy lodges.

Naturally, all of the tours that have a base in and around Las Vegas give you the opportunity go out to the strip and have a go at thrashing the odds. Excellent SEO service . If you don’t believe strongly in Lady Luck, you can always sit around soaking up the ambience. Vegas is for you, whether you are coming solo, couple or family.

And it does not matter whether you are a complete noobie to the horse riding scene or you have clocked loads of horse riding hours. There are tours which will definitely suit your preferences and your budget. Of course, if you are a newbie, you’ve got to make sure your instructors know that beforehand so that they will put you thru a course fit for newbies.

Horses are impressive animals that may charm you like that. Once you have become used to horses and to riding them, you will possibly find yourself wanting to get a horse for yourself. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t providing you can prepare appropriate accommodation for your horse without causing unwarranted turmoil to the neighbourhood. Of course, you can always put up your horse at a boarding stable.

With a little investigative work online and with travel agents, Vegas veterans and pony folks, you can get info on almost all of the programs that will be available to you. Choose carefully, and welcome to the world of horses. It’s a world that’s not going to let go of you very easily once it has hooked you.

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How To Handle Horse Colic While Waiting On The Vet

December 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Are you fast at spotting colic in your pony? How quick are your reactions?

There are lots of misapprehensions about colic in horses and this can cause unintentional delays in arranging for therapy and care when colic does strike. Horses recover fast and completely if they receive instant treatment. As a pony owner, it befalls you to be completely familiar with all of the indicators of colic and to be ready for it at any time in the slightest. You can play a no-risk, effective game by following the steps detailed below if you suspect colic:

1. Contact your vet at once. Get his advice on what to do and comply.

2. Keep cool and calm. Taking some deep breaths gets you focused. You are not going to be of much help to your stricken horse if you are jumping around like a cat on hot bricks. Just bear in mind that colic can be serious, but unless in a very extreme stage, it’s not a killer.

3. Dispose of all hay and grain in the immediate vicinity of your horse.

4. If you understand how to, monitor and note down your horse’s vital signs once in 5 minutes. While your notes can be of great help to your veterinarian, don’t get upset if you are not able to do it. It is handy though not a life-saving requirement.

5. Leave your pony alone if she seems to be calm. Groom her gently with a curry or massage her if you can do it without causing distress. Beware of kicks and bites because she could be tender. When soothing hurting animals, including human beings, remember the golden rule: if they don’t desire it, don’t do it!

6. Try taking your pony out for a stroll if she appears to be very restless. A walk may keep her mind off her pain and also provide assistance in moving gas or other obstructions. Leave the pace to your pony. Whatever speed she seems to want to set, let her do so. In everything you do, target reduction of stress and increase of comfort for your pony.

7. Don’t constrain your pony in any manner in the slightest, whether with cross ties or otherwise. You will just panic her, leading to injury to either or both of you. Never forget you are coping with a pony in pain.

8. Try your absolute best to stop your pony from rolling on the ground, if she makes an attempt to. She may cause harm to herself, especially by amplifying her colic. Nevertheless do not try to stop her at the risk of injury to yourself or others.

9. Keep your pony safe from injury. Remove all objects that would cut or injure her from her vicinity. Line her stall walls with bales of hay to stop her from injuring herself.

10. You have no choice if you’re alone, but if you can call on the help of others, do so. It’d be a real relief to have somebody hold your pony while you are grooming her or checking for vital signs.

And more than anything else, keep positive.

These are some other tips. There isn’t any verifiable scientific explanation for this, but some horses do appear to feel better when they are listening to soft music. You can try out all of the genres of music that could be classified as soft and see what your horse appears to like best.

Rather like humans, some horses feel better when there’s company around, but some seem to prefer to be left alone. If your pony is of the company-seeking type, let her hobnob a bit with her pasture mates, if there are any.

As far as water is concerned, it’s much better to be safe than to be sorry, and so , unless you have specific contrary instructions from your veterinarian, it’s better to get rid of all water from around your horse.

Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers http://www.horsehorses.net/

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Helping Horses That Go Behind The Bit

December 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve seen a lot of riders blunder and send their horses behind the bit because they failed to create energy from the rear before attempting to create a connection. To put it another way, they were guilty of attempting to ‘hand ride’ with rein aids before actually using any driving aids.

You shouldn’t forget you have to first create energy. You then employ a closed outer hand to contain the energy while keeping the horse’s neck straight with some give and take on the inside rein. If I can use a rough comparison, utilising the hands before creating energy with the legs is identical to picking up a phone that’s not actually ringing.

If the horse is adept at ducking behind the contact, I would suggest that you do the following.

1. Walk your pony with loose rein for between 5 and10 minutes so he will warm up his muscles and get used to having your weight on his back.

2. Then proceed on a large circle as you set up contact with his mouth. DON’T try putting your pony on the bit while on the walk.

3. What you should do instead is to go at once to a rising trot on the large circle (say of roughly 20 meters).

4. Start creating power from the rear by closing up both legs and asking the horse to go further forward toward a ‘lengthening’ over 7 or 8 strides. Slow down. Repeat the process until your pony starts to associate the closing of your legs with going further forward.

5. Once the pony begins to move on eagerly from your legs, start ‘lengthening’ once you have felt him surge forward over a couple of strides, use the reins, make a fist of the outside hand, give and take on the inner rein.

6. You know that you have a correct connection when your horse surges ahead through your closed outer rein.

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