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January 2008 • VOLUME 29 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Trotting Poles Good and Bad The blessing of a truly gifted trainer, someone with both experience and knowledge, one gifted with years of studying throughout the years, each and every day all day long, is that they can take what can be a strength in training and take every last nuance out of that knowledge and help you eek every last element of benefit out of the training exercise that you are working on. On the other hand, the uninitiated, or someone without those years of experience, will miss small and key elements, elements that can make what can be the very best thing for your horse into something that contrarily will do the opposite. An everyday exercise that was supposed to do so much for your horse, ends up doing the opposite. This is where the frustration sometimes sets in for the everyday rider. When you follow the instructions, you follow the exercises, you follow the levels of training and no matter how hard you try you don’t find success. Why is it that we don’t see more riders and their horses end up in the higher and medium levels? Have you ever looked at the number of riders that stay in the basic levels? The number is truly staggering. Perhaps we can’t expect everyone to end up at Grand Prix level, but surely we can expect not leave all these riders who are spending good money on horses, trainers, lessons, and who are dedicated to learning a better way, at the beginning? Today, when we the people who are riding, almost always take instruction, why is it that when we have more and more people taking formal instruction, we do not see more progress? Should we not see progression from the past where everyone was made to ride horses or drive a carriage because they had no choice? It did not matter if they liked or hated horses. It didn’t matter if they had any interest in horses. It didn’t matter if they had any skill! Today, we have the opposite: we have riders who ride because they want to ride. Riders who take formal lessons from qualified (?) instructors. Riders who love and want to learn more! Would you not think that on average, the riders of today, because they are interested, because they we have more and more books, more and more instructors and trainers, some of the riders on average would be exponentially better? At least on average. Part of the problem is that we need to more carefully examine not only the exercises that we have. But we need to have experienced eyes that can help us with those nuances. Example: working over trot poles. If you don’t know what trot poles are -- no, they are not poles that trot off on their own. Nor are they poles that MAKE the horse trot. No, instead these are poles that we lay on the ground at a distance apart that coincides with the length of your horse’s trot. Trot poles are a common exercise used by trainers and riders all over the world to help their horses. But like any exercise or movement that we do with our horses, how we execute this exercise can mean the difference between work that successfully targets the goals of our training program and an exercise that actually might be detrimental to our training goals.
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