How to Bond with Your Horse and Improve Your Rides with One Simple Step

In order to enjoy your rides and improve your relationship with your horse, you need to schedule at least two hours at the barn. This allows you the time necessary to properly and therapeutically groom your horse, do ground work, spend enough time walking under saddle, allow the horse to look at potentially spooky objects and overcome fears, trouble shoot potential training issues, and simply hang out with your horse in the barn.

Sample schedule:

8:00am- Grooming
8:20- Tacking
8:30- Girthing and ground work
8:45- Walking
8:55- Working at trot and canter with walk breaks
9:20- Cool out walk, short trail ride
9:35- Untack and rinse or groom 
9:45- Clean tack and put away equipment
9:50- Treat wounds, apply salves, fly spray and turn horse out
10:00- Leave barn

Speeding is the number one cause of accidents on the road. I had to take a driver's safety course once, because I was given a traffic ticket for reckless driving. The main tenet the course stressed was to SLOW DOWN. They told us that speeding is the number one cause of accidents. In every auto accident, someone was speeding. The same principle applies in riding, too. You're going too fast. The horse needs more time. If you give yourself enough time to give your horse the time that he needs, you are setting yourself up for success and you are setting your horse up for success. You are lessening your chance of having an accident, you falling off, not enjoying your ride, getting upset, or not achieving your goals. Give yourself that time. Speeding is the biggest cause of accidents.

If you don't take the two hours minimum that is necessary to fully enjoy your time with your horse, then you are probably skipping out on proper grooming. Proper grooming, I believe, is the foundation for a good ride and can prevent problems during your ride. How is grooming connected to riding? You are bonding with your horse, as opposed to him just being bonded with the horse herd. Unfortunately, your horse may associate you with getting quickly pulled from his paddock or stall, having tack slapped on, a leg thrown over, a kick and pull wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am ride, quick hose, and throw him back out. If you schedule two hours at the barn, your horse will instead associate you with long grooming sessions, plenty of warm up time establishing you as the alpha, rides that aren't rushed, and in general a positive experience instead of an angst ridden one. Horses are much more willing to come to you when they associate that time with a leader and provider.

Of course from a physical aspect, scheduling enough grooming time is beneficial. You are stimulating circulation, the lymph system, hitting all the acupoints associated with traditional Chinese medicine, relaxing muscles, preparing better for work. At the least you are able to spot any problems like bug bites, cuts and swollen joints. The skin is the largest organ, so if you are getting a good curry session in (currying the horse's whole body, anywhere there is fur) then you have influenced his health greatly. Probably the most important part of the grooming session, which needs extra scheduled time, is hoof care. We all know the saying "No hoof, no horse," and it can't be more true. I spend a lot of time picking my horses' hooves out, every nook and cranny, thoroughly and vigorously brushing the frog and bulb. I am the only one I know who wears out their hoof pick brushes, and I get excited about a new hoof pick with a brush that is not too soft or long. If there are nooks and crannies (potential hosts for thrush, cracks, or white line, etc.), I will protect the hoof from the elements and further deterioration. So, if the conditions are swampy and wet, I will apply a hardening agent like Venice Turpentine or Keratex. If the conditions are especially dry, I will apply a moisturizing or conditioning treatment like Corona or Hooflex to toughen the sole. Additionaly, currying the coronet band, from where the hoof grows out, is very important to stimulate circulation and healing to the hoof. Not to mention the coronet band is the end point or ting point for all the  major meridians that run through the horse's body. Talk about killing two birds with one stone, just by currying the coronet. This kind of hoof care takes a lot of time! Saying you have to be in and out in one hour is setting yourself up for failure in your ride and in your relationship with your horse. It is much better to give yourself two hours at the barn.

Another thing that you are probably not giving yourself enough time for is ground work. You are setting yourself up well for a good ride if you take the time to work on ground manners, ground control, setting up the aids before you actually get on. Most of the aids that you use on the ground directly translate to your work under saddle. Use that time to slowly girth up, stretch the horse's legs and yield the horse. I can usually tell if a horse is likely to buck me off before I even get on. I think it is Parelli who said you need to perform your flight checks. Before you buckle in, you need to do your flight checks on the ground. What happens when I touch my horse's side where the leg would go? Does he resent my aids, or yield willingly to them? Does he have a good response to the bit? Will he move backward, forward, sideways willingly?

Another thing you are probably not doing if you are not scheduling two hours at the barn is letting your horse look at things while you are riding. Often times your horse is not paying attention to you while you are riding, and you don't even know it. They are looking to spook at something, and it comes out of the blue if you aren't paying attention to his ears and what he is looking at. If you let the horse stop and look at the scary object.. and look at it.. and look at it.. and look at it.. and wait until he is standing there, not trying to run away, and takes a deep breath, lowers his head, licks his lips, and his eyes and ears get soft, then you can move on and get on with your ride. As opposed to pushing him through those spooks which makes your horse associate scary objects with an escalation that feeds into his fears, he will instead associate it with having the time to realize that everything is ok and to look to you as the leader who will help him through it.

Another important time consuming practice is walk work. A lot of times we hop on our horse and start right in on trotting and cantering and movements. Plenty of walk work however goes a long way. You can really sniff out problems in the connection by addressing them at the walk. I try all of my lateral movements at the walk before trot or canter. If you improve the movements and the connection during the walk, they will usually be improved in the trot and canter. Especially in the heat, I do interval training. I end up getting more work done if I take walk breaks than if I just push through and do strenuous exercises and movements at the trot and canter until the end of my ride. I will do walk breaks on a long rein if my horse is out of breath or has just worked through a mentally strenuous exercise, but I can also do movements during my walk "breaks". I can work on the connection and do halt, rein back, shoulder in, all the yields, pirouette, things like that. 

Another thing you won't have time for if you don't schedule two hours at the barn is to trouble shoot issues with your horse. For example, if you are bridling and the horse throws his head up, ideally you will have the extra time to stop and teach your horse to lower his head, release his neck before bridling and begin to have a positive association with the bridling process. When you have not scheduled enough time at the barn, you will have to gloss over this issue, and it will probably get worse instead of better. Another example is if your horse has a problem picking up his hooves quietly and letting them rest in your hand as you pick them. If there is not enough time, you will have to just get it done and get to your ride as opposed to spending extra time to work on hoof handling separately. And a horse that is difficult to handle with his hooves is probably going to be a horse that is difficult to handle under saddle. 

Going along with this discussion about giving yourself enough time at the barn is cancelling. A lot of people decide not to go to the barn unless they know they will be able to use the arena or only if they will be able to ride. I still give myself the full amount of time at the barn even if the weather is bad, or the arena is flooded, or if the horse is missing a shoe, etc. I can still get so much done at the walk under saddle, or I can get a lot of good therapeutic grooming done, or ground work that I would not otherwise have the time for. I can do extra ground work, maybe working on something fun like half-steps or tricks that I wouldn't otherwise have time for if I were to have a full riding session. Not being able to ride, to me, is not an excuse to not go out to the barn. I can do a lot of ground work, body work, stretches. 

When you go to the barn instead of cancelling, it really helps you bond with your horse, and gives him another format for bonding with you besides just the ride. The Arabian breed, for example, has a long history of living, eating, and sleeping in tents with it's owners and riders, the Bedouin Knights,  and unfortunately we have departed from that closeness and working relationship. I try to get back to that and simulate that by spending a lot of time in the barn with my horses. They can stand there while I clean my tack, have a conversation with someone, or write in my notebook. Further, I would like the equestrian community to get back to barn "parties", like tack cleaning parties, trimming or mane pulling party, etc. This time just "hanging out" in the barn, if you will, is the time that the personality of your horse can come through. You can find out where his favorite itchy spot is, or if he has a little quirk or trick or something funny he likes to do, and have a laugh.

I have had people joke that it takes me a long time to actually get on a horse, but there is still shavings or hay in his mane and tail. What have I been doing that whole time? This probably explains it!