Good afternoon this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride here with my lovely wife Karen Loshbaugh to wish you all a very merry Christmas! We are out here today with Bailador, who we introduced you to a few times earlier. Leslie experienced working over his back yesterday, and today Karen will be working him.

As you can see in the video, he has really begun to swing over his back. Bailador is a very big horse, 17.3 or so, and like we see with so many other horses his size, they have been shut down. They have never really been allowed to go in their full gaits because usually someone gets on them that are afraid of the size of the gait and how big the wave is. This horse has a big push through it’s back. So when you go out to choose a horse, it’s the size of wave you can ride. In other words, the horse at it’s worst moment is going to give you a little buck, and every horse is going to do it now and then and some of them are very big waves. We see now how beautifully this horse is stretching over it’s back.

Now Karen will bring him up to show us how high we can bring the poll without losing this trot. This is what you need to do every day, you find the position that lets the horse move through the back and then you simply bring the poll up as high as you can until you feel that begin to adversely affect it. You see in the video how he starts to lose his back end from out from under him. This is a horse that has just begun to find his back in the last few days, so that is what we expect to happen. So Karen will go back to stretching him all the way down again and then bring him up again. She will see how high she can bring him without losing him.

Like most of these big horses that have been put in draw reins and neck stretchers and other devices he is sometimes behind the vertical and over bent in the third vertebrae. So once again, she will bring him up as high as she can. Notice how she brings her hands upwards instead of backwards, so all we are asking of the horse is to bring it’s poll up. In horses that have been broken, anytime you touch with backwards pressure on the rein, they bend over. As soon as he starts to lose it, she brings him right back into the stretch again. Now Karen shows us the full length of his neck again asking him to stretch all the way down. Then she eases him back down into a nice swinging walk, without bringing him up, and her seat being the last thing. Look how nice and swinging his walk is.

Once again this is Will Faerber, Karen Loshbaugh and Bailador here wishing you a Merry Christmas! Thank you so much and we will see you next time!

back Bailador Christmas classical foundation Karen Loshbaugh poll San Diego horse training stretch swing topline Will Faerber