Horses have to be warmed up before they are worked hard, but I see a large amount of puzzlement in dressage riders about the way to set about warming their horses. If you are in this same boat, the 9 tips given below should help you to get things right when talking of warming up your pony.
Your target in putting your pony through a warm-up drill is to work the kinks out of his body. It might last for as little as 10 minutes, or it could go much beyond that, right into your actual ride.
1. Presumably you have just taken your pony out of his stall after a night’s rest, after mounting, use the 1st 5 to 10 minutes to leisurely walking him around.
2. After you are done with walking take up contact to start the warm-up.
3. Concentrate on the three 1st ingredients of the coaching scale, Rhythm, Suppleness, Connection. I usually begin working my horse out on these 3 factors in a sizeable circle. Once things are well under way, I’ll expand to a bigger area in the arena.
4. Rhythm: As you put your horse thru walks, trots and canters, make sure the rhythm is constant and regular and the tempo is not faster or slower than it should be.
5. Suppleness: Take equally as much time as you judge right, getting your horse supple and relaxed both physically and mentally. Effort accompanied by physical or psychological strain isn’t going to bear fruit. By suppling your horse, you get him physically relaxed. When he’s relaxed physically, he will also relax mentally.
Supple the pony by bending his neck about 7 inches to inside neutral (neutral occurs when the horse’s nose is lined up with the crease in the middle of his chest); as you do so you should additionally be closing your leg on this same side.
Do a 3-supple set, meaning you bend him and instantly straighten him out three times, smooth and fast. After about 8 strides are gone by, repeat the 3-supple set.
6. Connection: Utilise a connecting half halt and get the horse on the bit. This half halt is a version of the main half halt (briefly closing the seat and the legs and hands) that you use to put a horse on the bit.
Close both legs for 3 steady seconds like you would like a extending, then make a fist of the outside hand to capture the energy and recycle it back to your horse’s rear legs. Give him 3 or 4 little inside rein vibrations or squeezes to keep his neck straight. Your connecting half halt should stretch over 3 seconds approximately, during which period you ‘add, add and add’ the hind legs through the closed outer hand while keeping up poll flexion to the inside.
While warming up, I connect the pony. I ride him long and low, but if he seems heavy on the forehand, I ride the ‘horizontal balance’, when his topline parallels the ground.
7. If things should fail to work out right, simply go back right to the beginning of your coaching scale. Re-establish a regular rhythm to begin with and supple the pony next. Make a demand for connection eventually.
8. When you are doing the rhythm, suppleness, connection routine, you must get any pony at the initial training level to do elementary figures such as circles, shallow loops and serpentines.
Horses at the first or second levels can also do school figures, leg-yields as well as elastic workouts like soft lengthening before going back to working gait.
9. A lot of riders get their dressage horses to do gait to gait transitions while warming up. My very own opinion is that the horse must be well warmed up before you put him thru transitions. I thus save transition schooling for the second segment of the work out, when the warming up is done.
Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse loversread more
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