Help with nappy young Warmblood

You could have described Freddy exactly! The napping has no rhyme or reason, he can nap going out or coming in a few steps from the stable, he does not follow horses or people, he can stand or reverse for hours (I waited it out for 3.5 hours once), calmers make no difference (F does not appear to be particularly worried about anything) and it is very frustrating.

A couple of things worked for me:

- I am usually a big fan of hacking but in this case staying in the school and working on getting him more in front of the leg was helpful for me

- F will go if he gets a massive wollop with the wip. It can't be a hesitant tap, it has to be a swift wollop at the first sign of hesitation (he will buck in response to it, get another wollop and then the problem is solved for a few weeks). F has needed this kind of reminder but the intervals between the times when he needs to be reminded have shortened.

- at times when I have needed a quiet solution (e.g. shows with people all around us) I do the following: when he reverses I keep his neck supple so I can guide the direction he takes, then I do a semi-circle to get his back end towards the direction of travel and I make him reverse, a few strides later I rewind the semi-circle (i.e. if I turned to the left in the first place, I then re-wind by going to the right, this seems to work much better than completing the circle - I have no idea why!) back to facing forwards and I ask him to walk on again, if he reverses I immediately repeat. This works very well with F although I sometimes have to repeat it at different spots.
 
I would try doing despooking work.
Set some stuff up he may be scared of in the arena and spend as long as it takes to get him to go forwards towards them when requested. I'd say he quite possibly lacks confidence and this will help.
 
Many good suggestions here.

Slightly off the wall one, but sounds like you have already tried a lot. Quite a few nappy dressage horses I have worked with are consistently worked into a contact - which is fine, but sometimes the contact gets confusing and the instructions need to be stripped back to just 'go' and 'stop' - which is hard to do when you are also trying to encourage the horse to work correctly in an outline. So if you remove the contact and outline request you can clarify your instructions down to the absolute basic 'go' and 'stop'

To do this I would ride in a rope halter (with a bridle over the top with reins knotted, in case of control issues) and remove all concepts of holding onto the horses head. Do a few days work in the school like this (will probably feel awful, unbalanced and messy) and if it works, go and try it out hacking.

I ride lots of nappy horses, and I do enjoy trying to work the problem out. I think a lot of it boils down more to confusion than fear, and confused horses do respond in strange ways.

The other, not so friendly, method is to have someone walking behind with lunge whip who is willing to give an almighty crack on the bottom when horse stops. Trick with this is to do very little 'riding' yourself, other than keeping the horse straight. Don't hold onto the mouth and don't encourage forwards yourself - horse isn't linking you with the lunge whip attack, but when they do shoot forwards you don't pull up immediately, give them a pat and let them whizz off and contemplate what has just happened!!

ETA have you tried any polework/jumping? If you can find something that creates some enthusiasm in the horse you may find you can get more forwards without having to ask too much.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top