Guide 'N Gallop

11/05/2024

🥰🥰🥰🥰

There are so many ways to support a small business!

11/03/2024

Prepare yourselves!!!

It will likely be way harder one direction.
Do NOT lean, but rather put your pelvis over top of your inside leg.
Many (most?) riders unknowingly slide to the outside one or both directions.
This really helps!!

11/01/2024

Hope you had the best Halloween!

10/11/2024

Cute Helmets for those youngest riders! 💖

Equine Exchange Tack Shop is your neighborhood tack shop! Located in beautiful Northern Chester County, shop a large variety of your favorite riding apparel, horse supplies and equestrian gifts by such vendors as Mountain Horse, Romfh, Charles Owen, Kerrits, Montar, One K, Fager Bits and Ovation. Lo...

09/27/2024

We are firm believers in our unmounted curriculum and horse care! 🥰

“But they ONLY want to RIDE”: a pep talk for instructors. 🎶

We’ve noticed an uptick in these posts in recent weeks, with instructors venting that parents won’t pay if the kids don’t ride.

And the thing is - there are a lot of reasons why this happens, many of which we’ve discussed in THE BIG BOOK OF BARN LESSONS and a blog post titled “Why Unmounted Lessons Fail.” (Our most popular blog in 2023! We’ll drop a 🔗 in the comments.)

Maybe you’ve been accidentally sabotaging yourself by giving your students mixed messages about the importance of unmounted horse time. Maybe your marketing and web copy isn’t attracting the right clients, or maybe your barn lessons just need a little more zest.

BUT.

At the end of the day, this issue boils down to one question:

Do YOU believe that the general public should be able to ride your horses without caring enough to learn about their psychology, anatomy and care?

Note, your answer may be different than ours.

For example, a compromise that has gained popularity in recent years is to offer a recreational riding program, with lower expectations for advancement, that is strictly riding-focused. And while we think these programs are necessary and important for a number of reasons (a post for later!), we realized that we are no longer okay with offering exclusively-mounted lessons.

Because we no longer believe that anyone should be able to use a horse’s body for their own personal gain without caring about the ANIMAL. The living being, versus the sporting equipment.

If you find you have a similar belief, then the buck has to stop with you. It is reasonable for you to create requirements that honor and protect your horses and reflect what YOU know to be the truth of horsemanship, rather than meeting a demand.

If all lesson barns say, “Unmounted learning is non-negotiable, and here’s why,” then it becomes an expected norm. We’ll also fill our rosters ONLY with students who care about the horse as an animal, and the standard of horsemanship and equine welfare can only benefit from that.

Here’s a common analogy we use when discussing the importance of unmounted lessons with parents:

“If your child was learning to play an instrument, would you expect him to achieve mastery without learning how to care for and tune that instrument? What if you knew the instrument could suffer great pain and emotional distress from being played out of tune?”

This is usually pretty effective but you can take it to heart, too…

… because no music teacher worth his or her salt is going to tell students that caring for the instrument is unnecessary, and they aren’t even dealing with stoic, conflict-averse prey animals.

Let’s normalize making music with horses, not just noise. 🎶🎻🎶

09/26/2024

Halloween fun show!!

Saturday Oct 12

09/17/2024

Safety week! Great time to invest in a great helmet for lessons

09/11/2024

👻🎃💀

Start getting your costumes ready becuase our Halloween Playday is in a little over a month!! 👻

Registration is online at the link in our bio! Please message us with the events you want to compete in after you register online. The $20 pays for the full day! 🎃

08/18/2024

Every horse can teach you and every horse can benefit from you as a rider

A small stab in the heart is what you feel when you put up the day's riding list and you see riders sinking heavily in their shoulders when reading which horse they are assigned for the lesson. A small stab in the heart for that horse that for an hour will carry around a rider who has already decided that he does not like his horse. A small stab in the heart for the horse that did not choose the rider himself but still does his best, lesson after lesson.

Riding is a privilege and something you have chosen to do. If you chose to ride at a riding school, your instructor assumes that you actually want to learn how to ride. The instructor's highest wish is that you get good at it.

Often there is a plan and a thought as to why you are assigned to that exact horse. Before you mount up next time, ask yourself "what can this horse teach me today?" All horses have something to give, a feeling or a new tool in the box.

The art is actually in being able to get a lazy horse to move forward, to get an uncertain horse to gain confidence, a naughty horse to focus or a tense horse to be released. It takes work. If you think a horse is boring, it's more likely that you don't ride the horse as well as you think! It's not easy to be confronted with your own shortcomings, but it is in that very situation that you get the chance to truly grow as a rider.

The excuse that "it's not my kind of horse" is actually a really bad excuse. A good rider can ride any kind of horse. A good rider has trained many hours on different types of horses to become a good rider. A good rider can find and manage the gold nuggets in every horse.

If we absolutely want to ride, it is our duty to strive to do it as best as possible, even if it's only for fun. We owe it to every horse that carries us upon it's back.

Copied and shared with love for all of our horses, ponies and riders 🐎❤🐎