Good morning, this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we are looking at Karen Loshbaugh riding our new project horse, who is still unnamed! We are still looking at names for him!

We are about two weeks into this project and as you can see when you compare this to our first frames that we did of the horse, he now looks like he is moving pretty much consistently on both sides. There is no dropping of his hips anymore or losing the back end and he is starting to work through his back! We can still see from having been draw reined in his life that he still wants to crimp over the neck just a little bit, but the neck is starting to get out longer and longer all the time.

We can see he has got more swing in his back and has even started to engage his abdominal muscles, look closely about the level of the bottom of Karen’s foot there in the video. You can see those muscles beginning to come up and we see a line forming there along his rib cage, and that is what we want to see! This tells us the back is starting to come up but without tension. Sometimes we can see horses that look like that, but only after being rolkured  and things like that where they put too much tension. TENSION DESTROYS, always remember that!!!

We are very happy with his progress. His feet have been all taken care of, so we have a sound horse now. As far as him having any difficulties, we have not encountered any whatsoever. It’s just letting go of the bridle a little bit and letting the horse learn to swing forward and relax. We see this even in his canter, we see how large the stride is when we him go large in the video. These big horses end up getting very messed up because beginners get on them who can’t ride their size of waves so to speak. So they keep trying to shorten the stride down, and that drives the horses crazy, and pretty soon they are trying to jump out of their bridles, it’s no wonder! Watch how big this horse’s stride is as he goes large in the canter. He has a big swinging open stride, and that’s what he was never allowed to do so he became more and more frustrated. On top of that, his saddle didn’t fit correctly and his shoeing job was bad.

So after only two weeks into this project, we can see if we look closely behind the saddle there that his back is already starting to engage. It’s starting to come up quite a bit and is putting on muscle weight very nicely now. Look how nicely and even his back end moves and his nice big swinging trot now compared to the beginning tapes that you see of the horse if you compare the two. You see he looked kind of uneven behind, partly because his shoes were so unbalanced.

Karen suggests in the video that I explain to you why when he made that transition he wanted to jump up and throw his head up there a little bit against the bridle. It is just an old bad habit that he has. We don’t want to fight with that, we just send him on forward into the bridle and you can see how quickly he comes back. So it’s a strength issue that we have to deal with here.

Look how beautifully this horse can open up his stride as she goes large at the canter! You can easily see how frustrated a big horse like this can become when people just shorten them and shorten them and shorten them and are never allowed to go into their true working gaits. Karen will bring him back to a trot and we will see how that downward transition goes and right back into the stretch again, very nice! This time he made the transition nicely over his back, beautiful! As she asks him to stretch, he is nice and lose over his back and he is starting to get even longer through the neck, that’s what we want to see! You can still see that he does still curl back a little bit, but that’s from being over draw reined. He’s got a  little bit of a crimp in his upper part of his neck there, that happens very often unfortunately because of being over draw reined. Whenever we have horses that have been draw reined, we get them to stretch and they look like they are coming behind the bridle because the neck already has a crimp in it. So it will take us a few weeks to straighten that out, but already she’s got the neck longer and more active and seeking the contact with the bridle and so very even, very nice!

So once again, the best thing is to take a comparison. Go back and look at our earlier first couple of days that we worked this horse and look at his trot from then till now, this is only two weeks time! This is from a horse that was supposed to be dangerous…doesn’t look very dangerous does he? He is a much happier boy now! This is Will Faerber, Karen Loshbaugh and our still unnamed horse from Art2Ride. Thank you very much for joining us today!

back bridle canter classical foundation draw reins Karen Loshbaugh muscles name neck San Diego horse training stretching tension Will Faerber