Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride. I want to give you a simple idea of how you can improve the horse’s contact and acceptance with the bridle.

I have received several emails lately about how people’s horse’s mouths have been ruined and they can’t ride them in bridles any more and have to ride them in hackamores and things like this. So I wanted to share a little secret about how to get your horse to accept the bridle that we use as well as my father, Nuno Olivera and many masters. We use a sugar cube.We want the horse to enjoy the bit, mouth the bridle and get their salivary glands to work. We want to see the horse’s mouth softening as well as a nice foam. I am also a singer and eating these hard candies keeps …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride working here with Frauke Murphy for her and her horse’s first lesson with us. I taped a little bit of when we began on the lunge line so you can see what we started with, which you can find under our videos.

This is a horse that has done very well on the western circuit and has had about ten years of training. What we noticed is while she is very obedient, she is working very hollow and pulling her neck over and cranking over in the third vertebrae and not seeking the bit, which is what we see now. They have done a very good job of teaching her how to be a nice quiet horse, but now she will learn how to work over her back and the ride she will give …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we have been introducing you to our new horse in training, Bailador!

This is about the fifth time I’ve lunged him. He is used to having his head tied down and would brace upward and tighten. This is a horse that used to spook at every little sound and would jump out of his skin, and like so many other horses today is only half trained. If everything is perfect, this horse will kind of go along okay but as soon as something goes wrong he was ready to jump out of his skin and buck. After only a few days, he is already starting to relax and stretch into the contact. Notice how long I have the side reins on this horse, just like we have shown you in other videos. …

Good afternoon this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and today I am here with Dave Murphy and his horse Zoey. You have all seen Zoey on previous videos, and today she is about 5 or so months into training with Art2Ride. I come about once a week to help Dave out.

One of the things that we are talking about with this horse that I want you to see and understand is until you ride a horse much, the horse has to be accepting contact with the bridle. If you were to read the old Spanish riding school manual for instance, they would lunge a horse for a year before they rode it. As you can see in the video Zoey’s mouth now has a nice foam forming around the edge of her lips, which tells you that the horse is …

Good afternoon this is Will Faeber from Art2Ride and I am going to give you an update on Mr. Murphy after a few requests have come to us to see more from them.

He has had about seven or eight lessons under saddle after working her on the lunge for a few months, getting her to stretch into the contact, going quite nicely, calming down and not being so over reactive about everything. We just finished lunging her getting her into a nice place even after having a few days off! She was a little excitable but she settled right down in a reasonable amount of time, maybe a little longer than we would ultimately like. It took about thirty minutes today when we would like to see her calming down ultimately in ten or so, but that’s alright.

Dave is working on …

Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we are continuing our discussion of long reining.

We have already gone through steps one and two, step one was just lunging the horse and getting the horse to take consistent contact and stretching into the contact with the side reins before we even begin to think about long reining. Remember, we want the horse to be quiet in the mouth before we start taking any pressure against their mouth, that is why we never overly shorten the side reins. Correctly fitted side reins are adjusted so that the horse can still get it’s head up but not get it all the way up. This encourages the horse to stretch into the contact rather than when we see people over tighten the side reins and over tighten the inside side rein thinking they are bending the horse. …

Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we are continuing with our discussion of long reining.

So the first thing is we have already lunged the horse so she is nice and quiet. We are going to leave the side reins on at first, we leave them on when we are working with a horse when it is their first time in long reins. It gives them a little stabilization and makes it a little less difficult to keep them in the reins and it keeps them from moving their head too much up and down. When you are putting on the long reins you are going to put it on over to the outside, then you are going to walk around to the other side and hook it through the outside lower ring for starters and then hook it …

Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we had a request for some information for work in hand so I am going to try and give you a few points about that today!

This is our new horse Zoolander and if you come and take a close look here, both of my hands are going to be up (as shown in video) as I take the rein contact a little bit from the bit here and the other hand going up here (as shown in video) with the whip in my hand at the same time on this side. The most important thing to remember when you are doing work in hand is you’re wanting the horse to move ahead of you. Just like when you lunge you don’t stand around backwards, you stand to the front so when you …

This is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here once again with Dave Murphy. On Wednesday we showed you him working in the walk and now we are working in the trot for one of the first times under saddle.

Notice the horse’s mouth is still a little busy there, so we are working on getting her to quiet that down. Dave is letting her into a real working trot and if she has a little problem, he is just going to stretch up and then let her stretch and get longer. Just as someone might wonder what is a solarium — a space designed to let in light and provide a serene environment—Dave is creating a similar atmosphere of tranquility and openness for Zoey, allowing her to find her balance and harmony.

Dave is doing a great job there with …

Good morning, this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and today we are looking at Karen Loshbaugh riding a young Arab that we started from basically barely halter broke. He is just beginning to come into the phase of just beginning to take contact with the bridle. So the question that we are going to try and answer today is: What do you do with your hands in the stretch?

Lets talk about a few concepts of that. The main thing with the hands as Mr. Olivera used to say is, “The best hands in the world simply work like a pair of side reins” (They limit the length of the rein). They simply don’t give every time the horse pulls.  But better than a pair of side reins, they can actually maintain contact with the horse, and of course adjust to …

Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and this is Kristen Balch with her horse Contigo demonstrating in our video here this morning. We had a question come in yesterday about the correct position or the correct length of the side reins.

The correct length of the side reins is so long that the horse simply can’t put it’s head all the way up (In the video, you can see how Kristen raises his head a little bit to show how free his head is), he has plenty of room to bring his head reasonably in front of the vertical but he can’t put his head up so far that he can turn completely upside down. So that is the correct length of side reins.

The side reins should never be so tight that they draw the horse’s head back (Kristen pulls …

Today we are going to try to answer a question from one of our friends in Denmark who has written to us saying when she tries to stretch her horse she goes on a loose rein, and in her particular case, the horse stops moving and seems to fall apart. So what we are going to try and answer is the correct contact.

The correct contact in the stretch is contact, the weight of the rein, it is not a loose rein (this is one of the biggest misconceptions about the stretch). The horse should be just as much on the bridle in the stretch as it is when up in the working trot, as we see Karen doing here in the video. She is going to stretch the horse correctly first and we are going to watch the horse stretch …

Will Faerber discusses “How to Engage Your Horse’s Back”