These articles explain various training principles employed here at Free Heart Stables as well as opinions on common techniques and approaches to horsemanship. Some articles provide advice on how to solve specific problems whereas other articles address the basic underlying principles of horse behavior and training. Check these articles out if you want to learn more about horsemanship or want to understand the “whys” behind our training methods.
When you are working with a horse that has a mind of his own there will always be things that don’t go quite as planned. This is the moment that I see riders make the most mistakes. As humans our nature is to try to force something to go our Read more…
I recently had a conversation that brought up a lot of stuff for me and really helped clarify some ideas. I figured what better topic for a blog? This conversation centered around coddling in the context of when is it coddling versus respecting boundaries. I think the horse world tends Read more…
In my experience the “dull” horses are the ones that are actually the most sensitive. Yet they are labeled as dull by owners and even other trainers. These are the horses often ridden with whip and spur. Maybe they have a big bit as well. For some reason these horses Read more…
Every horse in every minute gives off a certain energy. In fact every creature does, we are just very bad at reading it. Most people can feel the energy shift when a horse tenses and bolts off or sighs and softens through their body after something stressful. But can you Read more…
I seem to be on a bit of a trend here with blogs on training philosophy. I think it’s because I’ve become a lot more clear on a few topics recently and really wanted to share them. This week I wanted to discuss the difference between giving your horse an Read more…
Horsemanship and riding often revolve around us being in control of the horse. Although that has become the status quo, there are quite a few problems with it. If we are always focused on being in control then it makes it much harder for us to listen to our horses. Read more…
Last week I wrote about forcing horses to comply to our demands. If you didn’t see that article, check it out here. What was interesting to me is the conversations that article brought up. It seemed that everyone took something different from the article, but there was a common theme Read more…
In the last several weeks this has been coming up for me more and more and it’s starting to really bother me so I figured it would be a good topic for a blog post. If you think about how we tend to talk about horses we use dominance based Read more…
My lessons last weekend really got me thinking, and it took me a bit to organize my thoughts into words. My weekend students are wonderful, caring riders, but they were struggling with my basic approach to riding and training today. I felt as if I had failed them because they Read more…
Every horse has a certain amount of work they are comfortable with and a certain level of work they are comfortable doing. As riders it is our job to slowly expand that comfort zone while keeping the horse happy to work with us. This can be quite the challenge. Just Read more…