09/05/2026
This is one of my favorite pages to follow. I don’t follow many. What a gift to understand how to help a horse.
Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better
A common mistake people make when working with horses is expecting progress to be linear. As if you complete a couple of modules and then you continue to the next one without looking back. To be fair, it often is just like that! With young horses who have excellent bodies, no emotional trauma and trainable characters, I've never had to backtrack.
For Dario, it's a different story. He's already 13yo and has a catalog of baggage like years of being stabled 24/7, aggression issues, poor conformation, terrible feet and restrictive riding. On arrival he was crippled- not an inch of his top line moved, he was lame on no particular leg and physically could not canter. We put him on a strict trimming schedule and Valentina the osteopath worked her magic and we then left him in the field to just be a horse for a couple of months in the hopes he would come right. It worked and so he was cleared by the vet to begin groundwork.
Initially in the roundpen he was very willing to turn in to the middle and stop, so I went ahead with hind quarter and shoulder yields and other stuff on the rope. I thought he'd be quite straight forward. However, as his body loosened up and moving became easier, he went from being unable to canter at all to cantering for 3 steps at a time, to eventually being able to canter a whole lap. At that point he decided that actually he prefered cantering to stopping! For a couple of sessions I lost the brakes completely as he cantered around and around, head up like a periscope, not looking pretty at all (pictured) but apparently just reveling in the fact that cantering was possible. I simply sat down in the middle and let him get on with it. It's a horse that has spent many years with his every move policed, controlled and restricted either by humans or by physical limitations; now he was finally able to run, unencumbered by ropes or discomfort- why wouldn't he want to make up for lost time and run to his heart's content! He found it difficult to settle down afterwards but again, previously he was never able to enjoy going fast and so he didn't have the emotional control skills to know how to calm down after getting his energy up. For the next few sessions I allowed him to run until he realised it wasn't so exciting anymore and actually quite knackering.
We're now at the point where he's figured out that stopping is just as important as cantering and so we're just about ready to go back on the rope and get back to where we were a few sessions ago. It wasn't a step backwards, it was a necessary deep dive into a step we'd only covered at surface level.
*Apologies for sporadic posting. My ankle has healed enough for me to do groundwork and ride for short periods so I'm back in work, I am having intensive Portuguese lessons 4 days a week and trying to keep up my work out schedule PLUS it's simply too much for me to write posts and the book alongside each other so expect more of the same while the book is still in the works😅
