Faraway Farm LLC

01/14/2025

"Why do we want contact? Because we want the horse to improve the lateral flexibility. In other words, because we want the horse to become permeable (French: perméable, German: durchlässing). This means that the horse lets the impulsion, created by the driving aids of the rider, go from the hindquarters through the back and neck muscles, causing flexion of the poll, and causing the horse to accept the bit, without stiffening of the jaw. The acceptance of the bit means that the driving aids and the guiding aids have met. At this point the process reverses itself: the guiding aids regulating the impulsion, taking care of the longitudinal and the lateral flexions and also of the different gaits and movements."

The Importance of Contact with Dr H L M van Schaik:
“During the schooling period, in which we want the horse to come under with the hindquarter, there will be times that we need to apply a lot of contact. At this time the horse has to learn that when we create more impulsion and increase the resistance, the horse should not try to go faster and become longer, but he should try to get his hindquarters under.Once the horse has learned to do this, he will carry himself. The more he carries himself, the more he understands what the rider wants from him, the lighter the contact will become.” Pic is Rodrigo Torres.
https://www.horsemagazine.com/thm/2022/01/contact-or-no-contact-that-is-the-question/

01/12/2025

In any dealings with a worried horse one statement holds true---“Patience isn’t patience if you are only patient when you feel like it.”

As in having a not so great day with a horse and giving it a pi**ed off yank in the mouth because “I’ve lost my patience with you!”

NOPE---You didn’t have patience to lose. You only had YOUR definition of patience.

And one yank in the mouth of an already anxious horse can undo days, even weeks of trust building. Reschooling is an attitude game, and it isn’t something that all riders have enough emotional control to take on.

01/11/2025

Jack Le Goff’s theory about the two kinds of fear---

Jack was the enormously successful coach back in the day of the USET 3-day team, and he would give his riders little lectures from time to time, and one that I remember from way back when was about fear.

Jack claimed that the human brain had trouble distinguishing between fear of injury and fear of failure, He gave as an example of the first kind of fear that you are a passenger in a speeding car being driven by a drunk driver along a road next to a steep drop-off into the ocean.

It is the very realistic fear of being killed at any moment.

An example of the second kind of fear is riding around the outside of a dressage arena at a huge competition, being watched by thousands of spectators. Your body will have most of the same symptoms as in the first case, but while the chances of humiliation are high, the likelihood of injury is low.

Jack said that athletes in most sports will feel fear of failure as a natural result of competition, but that true fear of injury might mean that you are in over your head.

Thoughts on this?

12/20/2024

Trauma does not ever just "dissappear"

12/15/2024

Learning to ride with proper application of the aids -should- create something of a pretty picture.

12/10/2024

"The human will let the horse down by putting a time limit on it. Taking extra time is a shortcut in the long run." ~Ray Hunt

How long will X take? Students grappling with their horses' gait anomalies often want to know how long it will take to resolve. For instance, how long will it take to fix the horse traveling with his/her hips twisted to the left? Or when will that cross-canter finally resolve for good?

It depends how entrenched the pattern is. Some horses change quickly, developing new muscle patterns and strength within 6 weeks. Others continue reverting to poor or dysfunctional movement even after they've seemingly "fixed" the problem.

Each horse's body is incredibly unique. Some horses "fix" their misalignments and never revert. Others slip back into previous habits from time to time even when the training is good. It depends on their physiology, their character, their lifestyle, and perhaps many more things we're still learning.

11/19/2024

Cold November rainy days are made for learning to lunge that pony!!

10/24/2024

When you DO NOT let anyone into your axis/poll for soft tissue or chiropractic, but your massage lady is at the barn when you're konked out for the dentist 🤣🤗 Git 'er done!

10/16/2024

If you or your "trainer" can't find results without leverage, the answer is filling an education gap on the folks doing the riding.

I asked a friend in the hunter-jumper world why he thought there was so much reliance on draw reins, restrictive rigs, strong bits, and he had a one word answer---“FEAR.”

“Fear of what?” I asked.

“Mainly fear of loss of control,” was his answer. He went on to say that many of the riders that he watched were basically either unfit, or green, or over-mounted, and that they didn’t want a very high level of risk, and that one way to lower risk was to have sort of “automaton” horses.

Horses can be gotten to a state, he said, of what we call “learned helplessness.”
I Googled “learned helplessness” and here’s what I read---

“What is learned helplessness in simple terms?
In psychology, learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly. They believe that they are unable to control or change the situation, so they do not try, even when opportunities for change are available.”

While this definition pertains to humans, we can see how it can also apply to a horse which has been repeatedly forced into submission.

So there’s that, and we see it too often.

10/01/2024

Why do biomechanics matter?

No one uttered this term to me, in all my years of riding and lesson-taking, until I was well into my 20's. I heard lots of other words: contact, responsiveness, connection, rhythm, impulsion, suppleness. All of them felt like these ethereal concepts that had multiple meanings depending on who you talked to. They also had varying degrees of importance or ranking in terms of what you need first before the horse can offer the next thing, depending on who you talked to. I still see this all the time, and hear about how frustrating it is from other horsepeople trying to do the best they can.

Biomechanics are the physical relationships and structural laws that govern how living things move. Biomechanics are the HOW in all of those aforementioned ethereal terms. They are vital in understanding how to correctly develop a horse for riding. This is the first reason why biomechanics matter.

The second reason is because horses weren't designed to be ridden. I cannot overstate how important this is to understand if you want to ride horses and ride them well: horses were NEVER designed to be sat on. The horse is born with a specific set of biomechanical tools available to him, and they serve him very well...when they are needed.

The thing is, those tools were designed for maximum efficiency if the horse's life is in danger: used for brief moments, blips in between long stretches of calm. Those exact tools can cause injury, unsoundness, and degeneration if used every day, day in and day out, for years.
. . . . . . . .

I want you to look at these two photos.

The top horse is using what nature gave him (and what work with humans helped him turn into long-standing patterns in movement). The bottom horse has been given new tools and taught how to use them to move in ways that preserve soundness, not encourage degeneration.

The top horse is moving in a way that directly ties into the same sympathetic nervous system responses that kick in when a horse is in danger. The bottom horse is demonstrating all of the power potential the nervous system makes available when the horse is in danger, but accessing it through relaxation and completely different biomechanics.

The top horse is using the ground to support his weight in movement, putting a lot of pressure on his joints. The bottom horse is doing a lot of that supporting himself by virtue of his posture, putting significantly less strain on his joints.

You may have already figured out this is the same horse. These photos were taken approximately two years apart.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: the way to develop the bottom horse isn't to simply take the top horse and add contact, impulsion, responsiveness, ride circle after circle, do pole and hill work, etc. Whatever you apply to the ridden horse will only reinforce what is already in him.

You must teach him, literally from the ground up, a new way of moving, a different biomechanical perspective. Some horses will come by this easier than others, but not a one is born knowing how to put all of these things together on their own when the human asks it. Not a one.

We have to show them how.

PC: Mandy Helwege. Thank you for permitting me to share your lovely boy.

09/16/2024

Having pursued Bachelor's Degrees in Equine Science, it is definitely a puzzlement how little the pursuit of actual education can weigh in the horse industry 😅

There are these big problems about getting educated. It takes too damn long, is too hard, too daunting, costs too much, isn’t easily available.

Think about how someone gets to be, say, a veterinarian---First, Kindergarten, then grades 1 through 12, then more years of undergraduate learning, then veterinary school. By the time someone has that amount of knowledge to get her degree, she’s been in school for darn near twenty years.

But someone starts training horses and tends to think that this should just happen, not in 20 years but in what, 4 or 5 years? Or in even fewer years than that?

The world of horses is full to overflowing with insufficiently educated teachers and trainers, but most of them are just fine with their levels of knowledge, and as long as people pay them to do what they do, they see little reason to change.

And, also, people equate winning with knowledge, so if someone wins a lot, that person must know. Which may or may not be an accurate assessment.

08/27/2024

Combinations of lateral movements are often especially useful because you can engage one hind leg after the other for a few strides each.

When you add voltes or corners, you bring the outside shoulder closer to the inside hind leg. This shortens the main diagonal, which helps the horse to lift his back.

Due to the natural crookedness, the hind leg on the hollow/concave side and the front leg on the stiff/convex side tend to repel each other like magnets of the same polarity. This leads to a lack of balance and engagement.

The closer these two legs can be brought together, the straighter, more balanced, and rounder the horse will become.

08/16/2024

If youre hearing "no" there is always a reason.

“I’m teaching my horse to accept contact”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this! Typically it is accompanied by a horse throwing their head up, diving behind the vertical, gaping at the mouth- essentially attempting to be anywhere BUT the contact.

Here is something I often say to people in my clinics.

Imagine you’re on a date. Your date grabs your hand and doesn’t let go. You squirm to get away, but he holds tighter. He says, some day you will have to hold my hand so you need to get used to it. I won’t release until you accept this contact. Maybe he’s brought up in the school of thought that your display of evasion should be countered with a strap of some kind to prevent you from moving away- a flash nose band of sorts for you.

It doesn’t matter how light or heavy he touches- it is contact that isn’t right for the moment. It’s greedy, and inappropriate.

Now imagine you’re on a date and the conversation has lead you to realize you really enjoy his company. Your relationship is developing, he brushes your hand, you reach out and hold it.

Those are two very different feelings, and they come from two very different places.

When the conditions are there, the contact is taken by the horse. Not the other way around.

Contact has meaning. It is not meaningless pressure on the horses mouth, it is a holding of hands while you dance- it is a connection between your body and the horse’s hind legs. It is the display of everything you believe and who you are- manifested through your hand and into the horse- and the horse’s response is a direct representation of their preparation and feelings about your body and hands.

08/08/2024

Can't say it enough: 👏gadgets👏do👏 not👏make👏up👏for👏proper👏work👏 and👏conditioning👏

08/05/2024

A great illustration of how a horse is knocked off balance by using the inside rein to turn/bend. The right is correct, as the horse is turning with both shoulders, the left horse has been knocked over his outside shoulder, and will fight for his balance beneath the rider by allowing his haunches to fall in.

08/01/2024

This weekend a client and I had the misfortune of crossing paths with a now unwelcome individual who was not remotely well-versed in empathetic handling of horses with traumatic history. Or frankly ethical behavior at someone else’s place of business. Thankfully, the exchange was predominantly verbal in the form of unsolicited advice given in invasive fashion - unfortunately too clandestinely to be handled at the time of occurrence.

To the individual in question, and you certainly know who you are: thankfully this client informed me of your behavior choices, so we were able to unpack them. -None- of what you chose to do was missed. Do better. You were a guest for less than an hour, and observed less than 30 minutes of riding. To. Sell. A. Saddle. Not your heavy handed and aggressive training opinions. If you cannot open your ears to catch up on years and years of training context for which you👏have👏not👏been👏present👏 - you have no place to insert yourself. Certainly not to insist on a need for added severity on a horse who kept it together very, very well in a change of saddle, in a pop up thunderstorm, with other horses coming in through the arena keyed up and upset. He and his rider behaved just as they needed to in the circumstances. You, on the other hand, absolutely did NOT.

CAN A PROBLEM EVER BE FIXED?

Problems with a horse are not fixed because we want them fixed. For things to change with our horse it must begin with things changing with how we work with our horse.

“You don’t help the horse if you don’t help the owner.”

This is the basis of clinics. Clinics are intended to educate riders, not horses. All the magic needed to address problems with our horses happens at home with the new knowledge we gained at a clinic. Nothing at a clinic is aimed at educating a horse. It’s all about educating the rider.

But why? If we can help fix a rider at a clinic, why can’t we fix a horse too?

It’s because a horse’s old patterns of response are never eradicated. They are never wiped from a horse’s brain. They live on inside a horse forever. You only change an unwanted behaviour by subduing the ill feelings that triggered the behaviour and replacing those feelings with ones of safety and comfort that lead to a new way of responding.

Nothing is fixed or eliminated. We just overlay new patterns over the top of old patterns.

With training, we can reshape the way a horse responds to our questions. We can show it a better way. A safer way. A more comfortable way. But if we allow the old ill feelings to resurface again, the old unwanted behaviours will resurface hand-in-hand.

The better the training, the deeper we bury the old patterns. It may seem that we have fixed a problem because we did such a good job of making sure the old feelings that caused the problem don’t come to the surface. But they are there and will return if we revert to our old patterns.

We can’t let our guard down. We can’t assume our horse is ever “fixed”. That would be a betrayal of our horse. It is not the horse’s responsibility to bear the burden of always being emotionally centred and being the horse we want it to be. It is not invested in doing what we want. A horse is only motivated by what response it perceives will lead to safety and comfort. It’s our job to help make that easy for our horse. It’s never the horse’s failure. It’s always our failure.

Photo: At a clinic, Huey is convinced that resisting a feel on the rope works best for him.