Schooling motivation , share your ideas

M

motherof2beasts!

Well-Known Member
Joined
17 March 2021
Messages
602
Visit site
Now winters here , hacking is limited to weekends. I’m lucky our school has lights but tend to get bored fairly quickly schooling. I tend to do 5 mins walk , 10 trot then some trot/walk transitions and lateral work and a bit of canter or interval 1 min walk , 2 min trot, 1 min canter then over and over and over again 😴.

I’ve looked for ride along apps that can give me some orders but not had any luck.

Do you all plan yoyr schooling or us an app that helps keep you on track ?!
 
i really struggle schooling at home, arena is small and weird shaped, but i practice dressage tests! obviously now we’ll run through the next one we’re doing, but before that i’d just pull a random one off the internet. warm up, run through the test, practice one aspect a couple of times, test again and cool down!
 
dottylottie said:
i really struggle schooling at home, arena is small and weird shaped, but i practice dressage tests! obviously now we’ll run through the next one we’re doing, but before that i’d just pull a random one off the internet. warm up, run through the test, practice one aspect a couple of times, test again and cool down!
Click to expand...
This is my method also. Gets you doing things you might unconsciously avoid because they're hard!

Much more difficult these days now I'm at a yard full of jumpers and the arena is never cleared but it doesn't all have to be in the right place to get the benefit!
 
You're all going to hate me, because I love schooling at home, and I have to be careful not to do too much. Firstly the schooling should be in three chunks, warm up, work, cool down, and it can take a little trial and error to find what exercises are best for your individual horse, but unless you're about to get bucked off always start with a minimum of ten minutes walking n a long rein, and try to do similar after your cool down to finish off.
Then try to actually feel whats going on and not just do a box ticking exercise, as a consistent theme always think about the scales of training, your own position, and always try to make your aids as light and small as possible.
 
daffy44 said:
unless you're about to get bucked off always start with a minimum of ten minutes walking n a long rein, and try to do similar after your cool down to finish off.
Then try to actually feel whats going on and not just do a box ticking exercise, as a consistent theme always think about the scales of training, your own position, and always try to make your aids as light and small as possible.
Click to expand...
That first 10 mins to not have stirrups, settle in, get your balance and make a plan are golden, precious minutes ✨
 
I do e-riders over winter so it gives me something to aim for. I can't drill tests though otherwise I have a bored grumpy coblet

I steal exercises from various freebie sites to try and help me improve whatever needs improving. Most of 2025 has been about canter transitions and baby lateral work - i tend to find an exercise or 2 that I like from somewhere on FB and use that
 
smolmaus said:
That first 10 mins to not have stirrups, settle in, get your balance and make a plan are golden, precious minutes ✨
Click to expand...
I'm impressed that you start without stirrups, but I dont because once I've done my ten mins walking I know I'm going to do rising trot and/or canter with a light seat in my warm up, so I'll need my stirrups. I use those first ten mins of walk to think about my position and check in with how the horse and I are feeling, I do love riding without stirrups, but I do that in the main work part of the schooling session.
 
daffy44 said:
I'm impressed that you start without stirrups, but I dont because once I've done my ten mins walking I know I'm going to do rising trot and/or canter with a light seat in my warm up, so I'll need my stirrups. I use those first ten mins of walk to think about my position and check in with how the horse and I are feeling, I do love riding without stirrups, but I do that in the main work part of the schooling session.
Click to expand...
Yeah fair, the stirrups is a me thing. I need my leg dangle time or I will sit perched on the saddle like a clothes peg 😂 doesn't matter what exactly you do with the 10 mins I suppose so long as its something mindful and preparatory.
 
Sign up to the Top Barn Twelve Week Challenge. (You must sign up before 1 January. The challenge runs Jan-Mar with lists of inspiration for groundwork, ridden and driven training, and weekly spot challenges too. Fab facebook-based community worldwide. Gets you through winter, deepends your bond and 1 April you and neddy are fit! Also when weather is crap here in UK, you can see other Top Barners struggling in Canada with their tales of minus40 so suddenly our rain and mud doesn't seem so bad.
 
I'm a lover of schooling and prefer it over hacking (I've had quite a scary experience hacking where I almost met my end with an arctic lorry and petrified horse, which has stuck with me ever since, and it's been over 15 years since it happened.....).

I spend the first 5 minutes ambling around on a loose rein, getting a feel for what the horse underneath me feels like. I have to be careful with Baggs my 20 year old as he has arthritis and a few other issues, so the first 5 minutes gives me a chance to understand how he is feeling.

I then pick him up and choose a particular thing to focus on in the session - sometimes it's working on him holding his balance in the trot, other times it's getting him to walk nicely and with purpose and less like a drunkard coming home from the pub 🤣.

Poles I find are really helpful in livening up schooling sessions and changing things around.

One of my fave exercises is to set two poles out and practice collecting within the two poles, extending within the various paces - I tend to focus on walk and trot mostly (as canter usually ends up with us freestyling some interesting moves!) and find it really helps to sit your horse back on its hocks and get it thinking for itself x

Another exercise which is great to use is setting out 4 poles in a cross design and you can work on extending the paces by going further out to the edges of the poles, or collecting by going more towards the centre of the poles (see badly drawn paint attachment for a better way of explaining what I mean aha!) This one is quite hard work though, so make sure to incorporate a ton of walk breaks and walks on long rein x
Pole Work Idea.png
 
I have 3 main types of schooling session I rotate between at the moment which means my 3 schooling sessions per week vary enough and stay on track towards what I want to improve this winter.
Session 1- Suppleness. Based on a centre circle, all 3 paces, counter flex for 1/2 a circle, neck straight, leg yield in, flex to the inside for 1/2 a circle, neck straight, leg yield out etc. Progress to serpentines, always bending and moving the horse away from the new inside leg.
I also like corner circles with counter flexion down the long side then true flexion for the circles.
Session 2- Transitions. Mostly my transitions are within the pace to get a real snappy difference between collected, working and medium in all 3 gaits but also trot-walk-trot and canter-trot-canter, and mine spends a lot of time serpentining in walk with halt transitions on every centre line because he doesn’t like to halt(!)
Session 3- lateral work and poles. I hate overly complicated pole exercises with a gazillion poles seemingly mostly there to trip the horse up, so my poles are very simple, but I use lateral work to get into/ out of the pole exercises. My favourite is just 2 raised poles on the inside track on a 5 canter stride distance and then a fan of trot poles on a centre circle and you can move between the 2. I also don’t think going over poles a million times in 1 session is good for the horse, so I do as much work around/ between them with the pole as a prop as I spend going over them
 
Thank you for all the ideas.

I do enjoy schooling at times but am very easily bored. On days work has been hard I tend to go in and then feel stuck with what to do , so will look at the apps recomended and see if they inspire me. I love lessons but can’t afford several a week.
 
I keep the same warm up routine so I don't have to think about it: a little "hack" down the driveway, around the edge of field 1, around the edge of field 2 (with some logs to step over), then to the "arena" in the corner of field 2 where I do the "working in" part of a warm up that gets specific muscles ready/gets them in "work" mindset. With one horse this is currently circles and serpentines, and with the other, it's currently circles and lateral work.

Then there are three possible parts to the main sessions:
- skills or exercises we can do, but need to improve
- new skills/skills where the horse is still figuring out the concept
- fitness

I spend the most time on 1 and/or 3, with a little bit of 2 at the end. Then we finish with the mini-hack in reverse, with extra laps or handwalking as needed.

I really like "From Warming up to Cooling Down" for thinking about how I structure a session, and for ideas on actual exercises to use, I use the "101 Schooling Exercises" book linked above, as well as Jec Ballou and a bunch of older dressage books. I usually pick 2-4 exercises to work on at a time, since I am riding outside and need to be able to vary my plan depending on weather, footing, etc. Then when we've gotten everything I feel we can from an exercise and/or I'm bored of it, I go back and pick another one to swap into the rotation. I only ride 3 times a week, so I find that I usually only need to go back to my books a couple of times a month.

I do find that having a goal of a few skills I'm working on at any given time really helps me figure out what to do!
 
Perhaps useful for some of you.
I had great fun a couple of years ago when I entered an on-line competition which included an "Equitation Class" which was all about accuracy. It was something like 6 strides of walk, 12 strides at trot, 6 strides at walk, 6 strides at trot, halt, 6 strides of trot, 2 strides at walk, halt ... and probably only lasted for about 1 minute. I found it incredibly difficult to start with, and really had to slow down and concentrate. It made me try and get a "feel" for a stride and get the pony really tuned in and listening and it made me appreciate the finer things. Then someone else suggested I try Slow Walk Work, which again, which is both an option for in hand and ridden, and is all about slowing things down.
Perhaps something to try if you are short of space, or time, or just wanted to try something different.
 
When I kept the ponies on a sheep farm I think I had the perfect set up. A warmup "ride" across a couple of fields to get where I was going to school, perhaps 15 minutes of schooling, then a fitness hack by walk/trot/canter up a long and not insignificant hill, followed by the "cooling down" hack back to the stables. All on the farm. Covered about 3 miles in total and took about an hour.
 
I was an old age beginner so I never did competing and didnt have the stamina to ride a whole test without stopping for a breather in the middle. But I read about the history of dressage and how it was originally a prepartion for horses which were going to war. In many ways this seemed to me to resemble the training needed to prepare the horse for hacking.
The horse needed to be listening to me but at the same time forward going without my control cramping its energy.

Like @Tarragon above, I rode a lot of transitions. Like Western riders, I insisted on an easy back up. But I also rode turns in and out of poles. One learns to teach a horse to do certain things which now seem like showing off: trot up the centre line and halt at X, or walk the diagonal on a long rein and canter away at the far corner. I got it into my head that if my horse did these things for me in the school, she would be safe to hack and she has proved so. But i dont know if this is because she is a very safe horse, or because the school made me feel safe on her.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top