LaBarre Training Center

06/22/2025

If you have a scheduled lesson on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday contact me straight away to reschedule to early morning, the rest are cancelled due to the impending Heat Wave.
Thursday will be pending the temperatures.

Riding horses in hot weather requires careful consideration to prevent heat stress and ensure the well-being of both horse and rider.
Factors like air temperature, humidity, and the horse's fitness level play a crucial role in determining if and how to ride safely.

Prioritizing the horse's comfort and well-being is paramount.

Rider Safety:
* Hydration: Stay hydrated yourself by drinking plenty of water and electrolytes.
* Appropriate Clothing: Wear light-colored, breathable clothing.
* Listen to Your Body: Pay attention to your own signs of heat stress and take breaks as needed.

When in Doubt, Don't Ride: If you have any concerns about the heat or your horse's ability to cope, err on the side of caution and choose an air-conditioned alternative activity.

06/16/2025

Thank you, Thurmont Riding Club Inc., for hosting me this past Sunday for a fun and successful poles/grid clinic, your hospitality for both horse and human is truly amazing 🤩
To the riders that joined me, Thank you, for trying new things that may have been just a little out of your comfort zone, the improvements you each made in a very short amount of time is brilliant.

06/12/2025

Excellent

You are not the missed flying change.
You are not the wonky shoulder-in, the judge’s 5.5, or the test sheet that looks like it was edited by a disappointed English teacher.

You are more than your mistakes, more than your failings, your failures, or your “shortcomings” (which, let’s be honest, often just means your horse didn’t feel like pirouetting today).

Your goals, your scores, your outcomes — they are not your identity.
They are data points. Not definitions.

When we start measuring our worth in percentages or ribbons, we risk turning something soulful and nuanced into a performance review with hooves.

Because at the core of dressage isn’t perfection — it’s partnership.
It’s showing up, rain or shine, for a creature that doesn’t speak your language but somehow understands your soul.

So breathe. Laugh. Cry if you need to.
But remember: the arena doesn’t determine your value.
It reveals your willingness to keep learning, adjusting, and showing up with grace — even when your inside leg is ignored like a politely worded email.

You’re not just training a horse. You’re sculpting a deeper self.
And that… isn’t something you’ll find on a score sheet.

06/12/2025

Even if Eventing is not your discipline of choice, your Instructor should be capable of giving correct instruction.

https://useventing.com/news-media/news/effective-ecp-assessments-what-great-instruction-looks-like?fbclid=IwY2xjawK3rrBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFQYmFoeEhvdUJScXlNdXJoAR5cl5hW7uH1aJmSpCaG2A4Bv6MFxcBAFwo9r3CHzjAzeyrGlhnjYfnORhKRqA_aem_ScfslTgjgpr-EneJIxJHsw

Effective ECP Assessments: What Great Instruction Looks Like

06/09/2025

Of all the shows I judge, The Special Olympics is by far my absolute Favorite.

Thank you to all of the Riders and Volunteers for motivating me to learn as much as I can.
You inspire me to be my very best.

Thank you for the many lessons you teach me outside of the saddle – how to be a better, kinder, and more thoughtful person.
Yesterday was a powerful celebration of courage, community, and competition!

Special Olympics athletes from therapeutic riding programs across Baltimore, Carroll, and Cecil Counties came together—not just to compete for gold, silver, and bronze, but to show the world what it means to be brave in the attempt.

Rain may have been in the forecast and just a minor distraction, but it couldn’t dim the bright smiles and determined hearts of these incredible athletes. Their joy, strength, and spirit lit up the day. 💖
Let’s cheer for every rider and volunteer who showed up, gave their all, and reminded us of what true victory looks like.

Photo credits to Karen Scott

06/04/2025

Join me

05/27/2025

Can you find your Center

Sitting centered in the saddle while riding straight lines or around corners makes or breaks your horse’s response—no matter your discipline. Your brain might tell you that you’re sitting squarely in the middle, but you probably have more weight to the right or left. This can confuse your horse, because he’s getting one signal from your hands and legs and another from your seat.

The secrets to riding are about moving your weight and center of balance from your upper body to a far down into your seat as possible. That means allowing your upper body to relax, your shoulders to roll back, your shoulder blades to fall down on your back, your back to relax, and your butt to unclench.

If you lean in one direction, you’ll find that your horse drifts off a straight path, resists as you go around a corner, or pushes when you travel a circle. This exercise will help you determine if you’re a “right rider” (lean to the right) or a “left rider” (lean to the left) so that you can square-up your position.

Try a simple Figure 8 pattern, cones or markers can help give a visual aid.

Paying close attention to your hand position will make a big difference in your success at this exercise.
Neutral position—hold your hands about 9 inches above the withers, with your reins even and your wrists straight. Think of your horse’s neck running right through the middle of your hands in a straight line. When you execute a turn, think of your reins like a steering wheel. To turn to the left, raise your left hand and lower your right hand. It’s the opposite for a right turn.
Also, as in driving a car, you’ll begin looking into your turn before you get there and ease into it, making a slow but deliberate movement, then ease back onto the straight line.

Beginning at one of the corners, pick up a working trot. Travel a straight, diagonal path to the opposite corner. On this track, be cognizant of your body position. If you lean in one way or the other, it’ll affect the straightness of your approach and the success of your turns. Keep your body straight and your eyes on the destination.

Here’s where you really learn if you’re centered or not. When you pass between the middle cones, if you’re directly in the middle of the markers, you’re probably centered. If you’re leaning toward one side, you’ll wind up more toward that cone—or even hit it or go outside it. If you have to move your hands left or right as you travel between the middle cones, pay close attention to which direction, then check your body position.
You’ve probably dropped the opposite hip or shoulder, at the very least.

Work the exercise in both directions, paying close attention to whether you struggle more with turns and straightness to the left or right.
If, for example, it’s more difficult to the left, you’re probably a “right rider,” and tend to lean in that direction.
Spend more time working this exercise in your weaker direction, and pay close attention to squaring your body. With practice, you’ll reform your position to be correct and strong both to the left and right.

Other exercises:

Hand on Hip
-easiest on a horse that understands seat aids/neck reining.
This exercise makes you ride down through your leg and find your balance and center of gravity over the horse’s center of gravity. At the same time, you learn to be independent of your hands for balance.

Pick up the trot and place one hand on your hip. Your other hand holds the reins, which should be just a bit looser than normal to keep you from balancing on the horse’s mouth. As you trot, make an elongated figure-eight. Your outside hand should hold the reins as you go around the turn, so as you change directions, you will change hands. For example, on the left circle, left hand is on hip and right hand on reins.
Vice-versa for the other direction.

This forces you to turn your body toward the direction you are going. It makes you bring your outside shoulder forward, holding your inside shoulder up. Your balance is improved, and you relax and flow with the horse.

No Irons Required
When you ride without stirrups, you are forced to stay more centered on the horse, so your overall balance and “feel” improve.

Make sure your horse is quiet and relaxed.
If you or your horse becomes concerned start slowly, drop irons, ride for a little bit, then pick them back up.
For example: drop stirrups, do a half circle. Come out of the circle, pick up stirrups and ride a few minutes before dropping the stirrups again, continuing the pattern until more comfortable.

If you do little bits of riding without stirrups, you don’t wear out or get in trouble, and pretty soon you can do this more often and for longer. Soon, you can trot and post without stirrups.
It’s a great idea to ride without stirrups or reins on the longeline. This way, you learn to create transitions and tell your horse where to go with your seat and leg aids – instead of your hands.

If you don’t push yourself, you’re never going to get better.

05/26/2025

Engagement is “carrying power,” rather than “pushing power”.
A prerequisite for upward thrust/impulsion.”
[USDF Glossary of Judging Terms]

Engagement is about the weight carrying capacity of the hind legs, as opposed to the pushing power of the hind legs.

The feeling of the horse, properly engaged, is one of balance and lightness of the shoulders, so that he can perform the movement of whichever level he is at with ease and fluency. In other words, 80% of your results or outcomes actually come from just 20% of what you actually do.

When we talk about exercises; transitions, small circles, shoulder-in, the point is to have a clear objective at the start as to what we are doing and the effect we are trying to create.
For example, [the objective] in a downward transition is that the horse remains straight and takes his weight further back onto the hind legs.
Any transition should be a responsive reaction to an aid, the degree of response – the time it takes for a transition to happen – should depend on the stage of training of the horse. It is quite deliberate that at the lower levels train in such a way that transitions can be progressive as the horse’s balance at that stage does not allow too immediate a reaction.

With small circles, [the objective] is suppleness to bend without loss of the hindquarters, submission to the outside aids, and no loss of activity. Then, the circle itself helps produce more suppleness and engagement.

Engagement is so connected to the half-halt. It is where it comes from as the horse’s natural desire to go forward meets up with and accepts the half-halt. This in return has the effect of changing the horse’s balance.

With exercises to develop engagement, we should be using transitions, creating more and more desire to use the hind leg.
A lot of people don’t get to engagement because they are so concerned about control. It happens most often at novice and elementary levels, riders want to feel in control, so they slow down, which is entirely the wrong step to take. You have to put the power in first, then control it with the half-halt. To do it you have to get through that wobbly feeling, before the balance and engagement is improved by the use of the half-halt, without being tempted to slow down.

It is a stepping stone to a different range of movement.
Once the horse accepts the half-halt, and his power is there with balance through engagement, suddenly it is a different horse.

Engagement has nothing to do with speed.
You can go wrong in another way and speed the horse out of balance, which creates similar problems at the other end of the scale.
What engagement is, is strength in the hind leg, a willingness to take weight back off the front end. When you see a really engaged extended trot, it is not fast. A full development of power, yet the horse is completely in balance, it is uphill.

At the moment you ask for more power, the horse should not try to run against the hand or contact. He should immediately improve his ‘lift’ and transform the extra power into height. As the weight is carried two-thirds on the hind end, it allows freedom in the shoulder. When you see a really top horse, it is almost as if he feeds himself in spring and lift.

In a transition from extended to collected and back to extended trot for example, as the horse comes out of collection, he should be able within two or three strides to open up to the full extension of his natural reach. When he comes back to collection, he should not ‘break up’ in front in his rhythm, that little shuffle you often see, but sit under as the front end comes back.

The whole thing should be like sliding a lever, in and out. You can’t suddenly say ‘I want collection,’ it is a very gradual process of developing transitions so the horse can come back without loss of power.

Young horses have to learn and develop ability to come back and at the same time increase the power in the hind leg – engagement. When that happens, collection is handed to you on a plate.

It is a gradual process.
It takes time to build the strength and to develop the full working capacity of the joints. The dressage horse is a mixture of gymnast and weight lifter.

Invariably your mind will add these;
“How much [engagement] to ask for?” and “Have I got enough [engagement]?” questions.
There is no fixed measure, every horse is different, but if the horse is right in the basic way of going it should be completely up to you. It depends on feeling how much you can move the ‘sliding lever’ smoothly, not switching suddenly, but in one continuous movement with no hiccups.

Development is all about day to day regular work, maintenance work. If you can get the horse both forwards and reacting to the half-halt, everything will come from that.

Try this exercise to improve your dressage horse's responsiveness and hind end engagement!
Get your horse to step under himself by working on transitions on a 20m circle. The exact transitions you’ll ride will of course, depend on the level of schooling that your horse has – but here’s a good guideline.

Spend the first five minutes working on trot – “almost walk” – trot transitions. Pick up a working trot, then half halt and slow the trot down almost to a walk, before moving on to a working trot again. You want to do no more than three strides of the slower trot, but remember to use your seat and legs to slow him down rather than pulling on the reins. If you just pull, your horse will likely hollow his back, won’t step under himself and the following upwards transition will be sloppy.



Then, progress to trot-canter transitions, aiming to spend less than half a circle in canter before making a downward transition. Because downward transitions re-engage the horse you will find that the trot immediately following a good downward transition from canter is engaged, bouncy, and over the back.



You’ll know you’ve got it right when it feels like a smooth upward transition to canter without changing the pace of the trot would be a piece of cake. More advanced horses can use walk-canter-walk transitions instead of trot.

Lateral work helps the horse to engage the inside hind when done correctly and also helps to develop an outside contact which allows for the horse to travel straight and bring his hindquarters underneath him.
Two exercises:

Exercise 1:
Trot large on the left rein. When you reach the F arena marker, ride a nose-to-wall leg yield until E. The ideal angle is 45 degrees. At E, change the bend to the inside and ride a 15m circle. Upon getting back to E from your circle, ride shoulder-in until M. Repeat on the other long side.



If your horse is very green, you can try this first in the walk, or focus on the nose to wall leg yield from F to M, only changing the bend back to the inside in the corner. You can also ride a diagonal line from A to a point between F and P to help set up the angle correctly for the leg-yield.



Exercise 2:
Trotting large, turn down the quarter line and ask for a few steps of either half pass or leg yield (depending on your horse’s level of schooling) towards the center line. After a few steps, straighten your horse up, ride a lengthened or medium trot across the diagonal over X, then half halt and ask for half pass or leg yield again. Repeat on the other rein.



This exercise has the effect of improving the medium trot too as the hind legs have to cross and come underneath the horse’s body. Remember to make sure that your horse is totally straight before asking for the medium trot to allow the hind legs to push evenly. Advanced horses can do this at the canter too.

The ideal way to spend the last 10 minutes of your session is with a bit of polework and a good stretch. Simple exercises such as four or five poles set up in a straight line or fan are incredible for getting your horse to flex the hocks, step underneath himself and develop engagement and expression.

Remember to work over the poles both ways if they’re set up in a fan, so that your horse uses both sides of his body evenly.

Walking poles force the use to work his muscles as he can’t use momentum to propel himself over the poles, and are a great way to develop an active and swinging free walk where the horse is loose over the back and soft in the contact.

“Engagement is defined as “increased flexion of the lumbosacral joint and the joints of the hind leg during its weight
bearing (support) phase of the stride, thus lowering the croup relative to the forehand (“lightening the forehand”).

Engagement is “carrying power,” rather than “pushing power”. A prerequisite for upward thrust/impulsion.”
[USDF Glossary of Judging Terms]

05/25/2025

The same but different

USEA Website Migration to Take Place Wednesday, May 28, 2025

05/24/2025

What a Great day for the MCTA Dressage with David Ziegler of FMF Equestrian clinic held at Full Moon Farm.

Thank you
Full Moon for hosting, David for instructing, Riders for participating, grooms and auditors for supporting.

05/19/2025

So, show season is here in full swing.

But...
Let's be honest...

To me the joy of horse ownership is doing what I love —ask yourself do you really have the "show bug" or is it FOMO.
If you really enjoy just riding ba****ck around your home, then awesome!

Do what makes you Happy.

There is so much else we can do with horses than train them and show them.

Horses don’t care, they don’t live to show off their talent.
Horses want a consistent, routine world that bring them comfort by being predictable, changes can stress them.

Ask yourself “Would I Be Mad if I QUIT?”

This is all of us at some point.

When we get to that last straw, the latest in a long line of small disasters, real or imagined, and we become physically and mentally exhausted.

Sometime in the beginning of the year we spent the greater part of a day in January planning out our show calendar for the coming season and just like that we watched as those plans all fell apart in the subsequent months.

On social media life was a perfect, pony-filled oasis when, in reality, it's was really fricken exhausting. Everything we thought this year would be was no more and we find ourselves sitting at the head of the table at our own pity party.

“Yes, I would be mad. You have made it this far; you can make it through this too.”

The harsh reality is that many operate on champagne dreams with a beer budget.
We are the average, those who gets by, but aren’t by any means blessed in the budget department.
We have far-fetched dreams of one day donning a red show jacket to represent our country but instead save up for the next winter’s hay budget in a change jar throughout the year.
So, when I say that I know we have worked our tails off to get to a certain point in our show career, I am not exaggerating.
I have held multiple jobs, I have scrimped and saved, and I have made huge sacrifices to get to where I am now too.

But here we are, it was all paying off…until suddenly it wasn’t.

That’s the way life goes, though, especially in the horse world. There are ups and downs, ebbs and flows.
It can’t always be easy, but does it have to be so hard?

If this is, you.
Do the only thing I know how to do when I am frustrated:
Write a list.
Pros-Cons

10 Reasons to Quit Showing Horses...

Horses do make you happy.
But does showing?

So, give your horse a cookie go back to the drawing board.
Rather than ditch your plans altogether, rework them.
Spend an hour just grooming while making a mental checklist of all the challenges you would have to overcome and then come up with plans on how to conquer them.

Regardless of if the new goal includes the show ring or not.