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Ensuring that you select the right saddle for your horse is vital. It not only affects the position in which the rider will sit, and therefore can be beneficial in preventing back ache or muscle pain, but it also affects the horse. No responsible horse owner would want their steed to be in discomfort and pain and so choosing the best saddle is very important. There are companies available who will measure your horse and recommend the saddles that they think are most appropriate but as with most things this service costs money. I highly recommend this service as it ensures that you will not be causing any distress to your horse when you ride it.

Once the correct saddle has been purchased it is important to remember that positioning the saddle on the horse's back is also vital in ensuring your horse is comfortable when ridden. There are three main muscles in the horse's back which can be affected by the use of a badly positioned saddle. It is important to familiarize yourself with these and their locations before attempting to position the saddle on your horse. This will give you an idea of where the saddle needs to sit in order to be most comfortable for the horse.

In addition to the muscles which can be affected by the saddle you must remember that the saddle is positioned on the horse's back and so this can have an effect on the spine and its vertebrae. Remembering this should remind you of how important this lesson is and that you cannot afford to take risks with your horse if you want it to lead a long and painless life.

Firstly, place the saddle on the horse's back, forward of the wither. Once you have done this, slide it back along the back of the horse until it cannot comfortably go any further. This will vary dependent on the shape of the individual horse butthe lowest point of the saddle should correspond to the lowest point of the horse's back. If the saddle is in the correct position, the saddle tree will not be pressing on the scapula (the shoulder of the horse) but will rest in the natural grooves behind them. The most common mistake is to position the saddle too far forward and this then causes the saddle to press on the muscles in the scapula causing pain, impeding movement and creating the possibility of saddle sores.

Once you have learned how to position the saddle you will find it comes naturally after a time. It is worth taking the time to do it properly though if you wish to remain the owner of a healthy, happy horse.

About The Author: The author is a regular contributor to Saddle Advice http://www.saddleadvice.com where more information about saddles and saddle sources is freely available.

by Faith Meredith.
Director, Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre.

There may be a few enthusiastic riders out there who look forward to the challenge of riding their horse through a fit of bucking or shying when they mount up. Most of us, however, would prefer that our horses never did either one while we are on their backs.

Whenever horses start behaving badly, we try to give them the benefit of the doubt. The horse that bucks may have a saddle or girth that’s pinching him uncomfortably. Or he may simply be high on life and feeling really good. The horse that shies may be hypersensitive to noise or reacting to the excitement of a windy day. Or he may be in need of a lot of patient “spook proofing” to build his confidence and recondition his responses to unfamiliar sights and sounds. The horse that backs full speed across the arena when his rider asks him to go forward may be trying to escape a severe bit or a rider’s unrelenting hands.

More often, however, behaviors like bucking, shying, standing up or that unrequested backing are the horse’s way of evading something the rider has asked him to do and that he understands perfectly well how to do. If the rider does not recognize what has happened and take measures to correct it immediately, the horse learns that evasion has its rewards. He doesn’t have to do whatever it was he didn’t want to do. Better yet, if he frightens his rider badly enough, the lesson may end altogether. What a deal!

In our training program, we take horses through four stages of learning. First we show them what we want them to do. When we’re sure that they understand what we are showing them, we begin to ask for it. When the horse consistently does what we ask, he has reached a level of sophistication where we can tell him what we want and expect to get the correct response every time. At this stage in the horse’s training, if he does not do what we tell him to do, we can enforce our request with stronger aids without upsetting his training program one bit.

If the horse bucks or backs because his equipment is hurting him, it would be unjust to enforce our request. However, if he’s bucking because he’s having a tantrum or shying at the barn cat out of high spirits and we fail to enforce our request, we reinforce the evasion. Today’s evasion quickly becomes tomorrow’s bad habit.

The best way to deal with an evasion is to ride the horse forward assertively. The idea is to channel the horse’s evasive energy into forward movement. The average rider finds this a scary thing to do when their horse is behaving badly, however. And if they don’t have an independent seat, they may not be capable of riding the horse forward assertively. Their fears allow the horse’s evasion to succeed and a bad habit gets started. Our students get a lot of experience riding horses like these when discouraged owners send their horses to Meredith Manor for “reform school.”

Upper level riders like a horse that’s bursting with energy because they can direct that energy into the horse’s work. Less skilled riders may want to make sure an energetic horse has plenty of turnout time during the day or at least before their riding sessions begin so the horse can spend its excess energy playing rather than evading. If your horse has developed a persistent evasion, you seek help from atrainer who can return him to ranks of solid citizens and improve your riding skills to build your confidence.

The best way to prevent the occasional evasion from turning into a regular bad habit is to keep the horse’s attention on you at all times. Attention is a learned habit for both the horse and the handler or rider. We start our young horses with a groundwork program we call heeding because its goal is to get the horse to pay complete attention to its handler at all times. At the same time, students learn to put their attention completely on their horse. If you are physically with your horse but mentally thinking about the what kind of pizza you want for dinner or what song you want to download from your computer, you are not paying attention to your horse. So why should he pay attention to you?

When you cultivate the habits of paying attention to your horse every moment you are with him on the ground and of bringing his attention back to you whenever it wanders, those habits carry over into your riding. To ride well, you must pay attention to every stride the horse takes, stride after stride. When you give your horse that level of attention, you start to automatically pick up on and correct those small losses of attention on the horse’s part that are the beginning of an evasion. Then a full blown evasion simply never happens.

Just like people, different horses will have different attention spans. Young horses have short attention spans just like young children. So their lessons should be short enough to end on a good note before they get too tired to pay attention any more. Some horses are more focused while others tend to get distracted easily. Developing concentration—both your own and that of your horse—is a skill that is just as important to good riding as developing balance or understanding the aids.

© 2001-2008 Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre. All rights reserved..
Faith Meredith has successfully trained and competed through FEI levels of dressage during her more than 30 years as a horse professional. She currently coaches riders in dressage, reining, and eventing in her capacity as the Director of Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre (147 Saddle Lane, Waverly, WV 26184; 800.679.2603; www.meredithmanor.edu), an ACCET accredited equestrian educational institution.

by Ron Meredith

President, Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre

Most people think you control a horse by controlling its head. That does not work. You control a horse by controlling its mind. And you control a horse's mind by controlling your own mind first. Mind control is what the training program we call heeding teaches our riders. They learn to keep their mind in the game stride by stride by stride by stride whether they are leading the horse from the barn to the arena, loading him on a trailer, riding him outdoors or competing at a show.

If a horse starts to run away, the first thing the rider should think about is riding the horse, not stopping the horse. Most of the methods proposed for stopping a runaway horse put you in more danger than you will be in if you just ride the horse until he tires or figures he's far enough away from whatever frightened him in the first place to think about stopping on his own.

If you try to stop a runaway horse by pulling hard on one rein to "double back" in a tight circle, you handicap a frightened horse two ways. First, you take away his ability to see where he is going. He is likely to tip into a ditch, slam into a fence, or run into a tree long before he stops. Second, pulling his head around to one side and locking it there creates real balance problems for the horse. The horse may stop but only because he has gone to his knees or has fallen sideways. The first thing you should do when a horse runs away is to allow the horse to see where he is going and keep his feet underneath him so he has the ability to carry you safely.

Trying to stop the horse with both reins does not work very well, either. A "cavalry stop" involves bracing the reins against the horse's neck with one hand to get some leverage while pulling both reins through the braced hand and up. Or some people bridge the reins with both hands about halfway up on the horse's neck then slide the bridge down toward the withers to crank the horse's jaw in. The problem here is that pressure by itself has no real meaning until you and the horse have agreed to its meaning. With a leverage bit plus all this bracing you might be able to exert several hundred pounds of pressure against the horse's jaw. But to a horse, that specific pressure has no specific association with stopping. To a frightened horse, the extreme pressure simply becomes something else to escape.

To make things worse, if you hang on the reins or tighten your arms or lock your back or clamp your legs, any move the horse makes uses your own braced muscles to bounce you loose. The horse can also pull you forward over his head easily.

So the first thing to think about when a horse runs away "always" is riding him, not stopping him. You need to have a mental picture of riding, of moving, with the horse. You need to control your mind and focus on problem-solving thoughts rather than allowing panic-driven thoughts to run away with your mind.

The first thing you want to focus on is maintaining your balance. If the saddle has a horn or grab strap, it is OK to take a hold of it to help with balance but be sure to do it with a loose arm. Tight muscles will magnify the horse's bounce and put you out of the saddle. When the horse first accelerates, you may need to lean forward a bit to stay in balance. But you should recenter yourself as soon as possible. If you keep your upper body upright, you will not go off over the horse's shoulder if he makes a sharp turn or over his neck if he drops his head.

Rhythm is the basic skill on both the riding tree and the training tree. And rhythm creates relaxation. So after balance you should focus on rhythm so that you can relax and get back in time with the horse. You can start by focusing on the rhythm of your breathing, then on the rhythm of the horse's surges.

When you are in rhythm with the horse, you can begin squeezing a little each time the horse surges then relaxing to allow the stride. This squeeze and release puts you in time with the horse and begins to put the horse's attention back on you. If the horse has not already stopped of his own accord, you are now in a position to begin using the rhythmic motion of your aids to help the horse relax. Gradually you can take back control and begin shaping the horse's strides instead of just riding them. And now you can safely stop the horse with the full corridor of aids he understands as "stop."

If someone is swatting a bee around their head with one hand and someone accidentally crushes their other hand in a car door, that person is going to forget about the bee. The pain in their fingers will quickly override any anxiety they had about a bee sting.

When a horse panics about some real or imagined threat and starts running away from it, a rider that panics and clamps and puts hundreds of pounds of pressure on his jaw quickly becomes the car door instead of the bee. You become a bigger problem than the one the horse was worrying about in the first place.

Heeding is about learning how to become the safest, most comfortable place to be in the horse's mind, the place he can always trust to be the same the same the same. So when things fall apart, your goal is to get back to being the safest place to be for the horse so he can forget about whatever panicked him in the first place. You do that by controlling your mind. It is not up to the horse to take care of you, it is up to you to take care of the horse.

Lack of confidence contributes to panic thoughts so if you are not confident around your horse, you need to work on that. Heeding groundwork helps riders learn how to use rhythm to relax their horse, to show the horse that this relaxed state is a place that is really nice to be, and then keeps that feeling going between them as they progress up the training and riding trees.

If you do not feel confident that you can ride a runaway horse, you should back up on the riding tree to the place where your own rhythm or relaxation or balance or whatever starts to fall apart. As you master each of the riding tree skills in order, you will gain the confidence to stay in control of your mind whenever the horse goes out of his.

 © 1997-2008 Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre. All rights reserved.
Instructor and trainer Ron Meredith has refined his “horse logical” methods for communicating with equines over 40 years as a horse professional. He is president of Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre (147 Saddle Lane, Waverly, WV 26184; 800.679.2603; www.meredithmanor.edu), an ACCET accredited equestrian educational institution.

There are lots of people out there chasing their horses around in round pens and rectangular pens and on the ends of longe lines without understanding exactly why they are doing whatever it is they're doing or how it is eventually going to relate to their riding.

There's one bunch that buys into the dominance and submission school of training. They think ground work is about chasing their horse till he submits some way and then drilling compliance into him. When the horse does whatever they tell him to do on the ground, they think he's going to do whatever they tell him once they're in the saddle because they are the boss, the herd leader.

There's another bunch that is actually a little afraid of their horses. They think if they do lots and lots of ground work it will build their confidence up. They hope that if they can get the horse to hook on or join up or climb in their lap whenever they want that somehow eventually that will translate into feeling safe on his back.

These folks have bought into the idea that if they can control the horse's body, they can control the horse's mind. Actually, it's the other way around. If you learn to control the horse's mind, then his body just naturally follows along. The best way to control a horse's mind is by developing a non-predatory, non-threatening communication system built of methodically applied, horse-logical pressures that create a feel in the horse of a shape you want him to take.

People learning ground work usually start out wanting to know the 'how to' of it. They're into perfecting techniques and they want to know exactly what the right steps are to follow and all that, just like a recipe. They see ground work as a mechanical process that every horse is going to go through the same way. Horses, on the other hand, could care less about steps and recipes and techniques. What they are interested in is how any interaction with the human makes them feel. Horses have a huge capacity for remembering the emotional feeling that a particular set of circumstances created.

So good ground work is about controlling the horse's mind through creating a positive emotional experience. You want to become the place the horse feels the most comfortable, not because you've finally stopped pressuring him and are going to let him rest, but because you are the most rhythmic and relaxed and non-threatening thing in his environment and that makes him feel really safe.

When you start working with a horse, you want to develop a communication system that's understandable to both of you. Working on the ground is a good, safe place for both people and horses to develop their mutual communication skills and establish the rules for their interaction before they try the in the saddle stuff. The learning isn't one-sided. There are communication skills both the rider and the horse have to learn if their saddle work is going to be successful:

• You want to learn to show the horse any new thing in a horse-logical way. That means that anything you show the horse is just one tiny, baby step away from something he already knows.
• You want to learn to show the horse what you want by using pressures that create a feel of the 'shape' you want him to take and the direction you want him to move.
• You want to learn to apply the least degree of pressure that shows the horse what you want without startling him or raising the excitement level.
• You need to give the horse time to process the meaning of any pressure and the chance to respond correctly.
• The horse needs to learn to trust that you are consistent and predictable.
• The horse needs to learn to trust that you are never going to apply any kind of pressure or degree of a pressure that is startling or exciting.
• The horse needs to learn to trust that you will never apply a pressure he cannot relieve by doing something that is just one step away from whatever he already understands.
• The horse needs to learn to trust that you'll give him time to figure it before any pressure increases or changes.

The mental foundation you want to lay in your beginning ground work is that you are the nicest, safest place to be in the universe. Once you've got and can hold the horse's mind, you start communicating with him using tiny pressures that create the feel of a shape you want him to take. As you do your intermediate ground work, you gradually begin to build a vocabulary of pressure-related shapes. Your horse's feeling that you're a safe place to be combined with his basic vocabulary of shapes will become your bridge from ground work to saddle work. Then you'll continue to build the horse's vocabulary of pressure-related shapes when you get in the saddle until he's able to play whatever game you want to play.

I can describe the basic steps involved in ground work with a horse but I can't tell you exactly how to apply them to your individual horse and circumstances. There is no simple way to describe to a beginner the feel old timers have developed for what to do around a horse any more than it's possible to make someone an accomplished rider in ten easy lessons. To learn to ride well, you have to do a lot of riding. To learn how to do good ground work, you have to do a lot of ground work. There are a lot of clinicians going around the country doing weekend clinics trying to help people short circuit this learning process. They pick horses to work with that they know they can be successful with in one or two days. The tough cases that are going to need weeks or months to fix get rejected. So lots of folks go home scratching their heads and wondering why they can't do at home with Thunder what looked so easy when the clinician did it with Bambi.

When people go home and try out this pressure-and-release stuff on their own horses, they make mistakes. Some of them give up trying because their confidence plummets or they're afraid they're going to ruin their horse forever or whatever. If the horse makes a mistake, you dont give up on him and say he's hopeless. You just approach the situation a little differently next time and try again. Your horse won't give up on you if you make a mistake, either. Keep the learning goals in your head, try to analyze what didn't work about whatever pressure you chose to apply, then change it, modify it, or decide to repeat it.

Whenever things aren't working out, just remember to go back to rhythm and relaxation. That's the basis of it all. Get your own breathing under control to help you relax and the horse will pick up on that. Then you can move your own body in a non-threatening, rhythmic way and ask the horse to get rhythmic again, too. Now you can ask again for whatever it was you were asking for when things fell apart.

If the horse makes mistakes, don't be hard on him. Just show him again. If you make a mistake, don't be too hard on yourself. Learn from the horse's feedback and just try again. It takes a lot of work to become a 'natural' horse person

Before either horses or riders master the sequential stages of their respective learning trees, they will travel in endless circles. The circle is the basic school figure we use to develop the essentials of rhythm and relaxation in either horse or rider. As they school their horses, riders should strive to make every circle the best they possibly can.

Circle work helps horses develop the muscles necessary to carry themselves properly in balance. Paradoxically, riding circles is the best way to teach a horse to go straight. Going “straight” on a circle means that the horse’s hind feet follow the tracks of his front feet. In other words, if you imagine a line on the ground forming the circle, the horse’s inside front and hind feet stay on the inside of that line while his outside front and hind feet stay on the outside of it.

As the horse works to stay straight on a circle, he strengthens muscles on the inside while stretching muscles on the outside. Just as we are right- or left-handed, horses tend to have a dominant side, too. Working the horse in both directions on a circle helps him overcome that tendency and become more evenly muscled. The benefits of circle work for the horse include improved strength, balance, straightness, and flexibility.

Riders must not only understand the theoretical mechanics of the aids that direct the horse on a circle they must also learn to apply those aids correctly in order to achieve consistently round circles of the same size. Riders do not simply apply the correct mechanical aids and leave them “on” to keep a horse traveling on a circle. Keeping the horse moving in a consistent rhythm while maintaining the correct shape of the circle requires that the rider continually communicate with the horse by:

applying the aids, assessing their affect, then reapplying the aids, adjusting their pressures as needed to make them more effective.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Etc.

The constant evaluation and adjustment of the aids while repeating the circle shape gradually refine the green horse’s understanding of the aids. Repetition also helps refine the rider’s application of individual aids and her coordination of the corridor of aids as a whole. Like the horse, the rider also develops both sides of her body. Riding circles will help her improve her balance, her strength, and her ability to coordinate the aids while riding in any direction.

While the aids for a circle are always the same, their application becomes more subtle as the horse’s training and level of understanding increase. To start, the rider places just slightly more weight on her inside seat bone. Her inside leg lies at the girth where it acts as the “driving” leg. Her outside leg lies slightly behind the girth where it acts as a “keeping” leg to prevent the horse’s hindquarters from swinging to the outside of the circle. The inside rein positions the horse’s head slightly to the inside of the circle. The outside rein receives the forward motion initiated by the driving inside leg and maintains the horse’s straightness on the circle.

The inside rein does not pull the horse’s head in the direction of travel and the outside rein maintains just enough elastic contact to hold the horse straight while allowing free forward movement. Remember, moving straight on a curved line means that the horse’s inside hind foot travels along the same line as the inside front and the outside hind foot tracks along the same line as the outside front foot.

The rider asks the horse to walk on by increasing leg pressure while opening or releasing rein pressure so that the horse has a place to move forward. At the trot, the legs drive the horse in rhythm with the horse’s strides. The aids for a canter depart are identical to those for the circle itself except that the rider coordinates them and applies them with more energy. Weight increases slightly on the inside seat bone. The driving inside leg asks for forward movement more vigorously. The inside rein continues to position the horse’s head slightly to the inside while the outside rein becomes slightly more resistant.

One of the times the rider uses a half halt is when asking for a decrease in gait from canter to trot or from trot to walk. The rider momentarily increases her weight on both seat bones while driving with both legs and resisting the horse’s forward movement with both reins. The upper body stays tall and open and the back muscles are slightly braced. This resistance is followed immediately by a decrease in weight and an opening of both reins to allow continued forward movement. When the rider wants the horse to halt, she follows the same sequence of aids as for the half halt but does not open the reins after decreasing the weight in her seat bones.

In the beginning, riders struggle to learn the correct aids to use. As a rider continues to practice and progress, the difference between simple application of the aids and true coordination of the aids is the rider’s ability to feel the results of her application of aids, to judge the effectiveness of the aids she used, and to make adjustments in the degrees of pressure and their timing in order to get a better result the next time. A rider needs an independent seat to be able to correctly coordinate all of the aids while riding a horse on a circle. While working toward that goal, however, students will ride an endless number of imperfect circles. Make each circle the best you can, then try again. Just keep riding.

© 1997-2006 Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre. All rights reserved.
Instructor and trainer Ron Meredith has refined his "horse logical" methods for communicating with equines for over 30 years as president of Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre, an ACCET accredited equestrian educational institution.