Camp Horseshoe Equestrian Center

Camp Horseshoe Equestrian Center Equestrian center located on over 75 beautiful acres in Prosperity, SC. www.camp-horseshoe.weebly.com

We offer lessons, trail rides, boarding, summer camps, and an equestrian team that competes year round in local hunter circuits. Camp Horseshoe Equestrian Center is located in Prosperity, SC has been instructing and entertaining many throughout South Carolina since 1998. Camp, lessons, boarding, trial rides and birthday parties are all offered at our facility. Through teachings of general horsema

nship and friendship, Camp Horseshoe has been touching the lives of children and adults alike by creating experiences that wont be forgotten.

2026 SUMMER CAMP DATES
03/20/2026

2026 SUMMER CAMP DATES

03/12/2026

No entry fees? Yes, please! 🤩 All Tryon Welcome Series Walk Trot, Walk Trot Canter, and Cross Rails Opportunity Classes are FREE to enter! Bring along the up-and-coming riders in your life to experience Tryon International as we kick off an exciting season of competition.

The Tryon Welcome Series presented by Ken C Feagin Truck & Trailer runs March 19th-April 12th. To secure your entries, head to Tryon.ShowGroundsLive.com! ☀️

03/07/2026

Teaching Riders to Feel the Horse & Not Just React

You've seen it many times while teaching. The horse drifts left and the rider yanks right. The horse speeds up and the rider grabs the reins. The horse drops a shoulder and the rider tips forward trying to compensate. Every aid is a reaction to something that already happened and by the time the rider responds the moment is gone and a new problem has already started.

Real riding happens before the drift, before the speed up, before the dropped shoulder. It happens when a rider feels what the horse is about to do and quietly influences it before it becomes a problem. That is feel and feel is a skill you can teach.

Here is how you can teach your students to feel instead of react:

1. Slow everything down.
Put your reactive rider at the walk on your quietest school horse and take away every distraction. No course to navigate, no gait to maintain, no pattern to ride. Just walk and feel. Ask them... what is the horse doing right now under your seat? Which hind leg just stepped under? Is the rhythm even or is one side dragging? Many students have never been asked to simply listen to the horse beneath them so it's a good place to start.

2. Give them something specific to feel for.
Vague instructions produce vague riders. Instead of saying "feel the horse" try: feel the moment the horse's ribcage swings toward your right leg. Feel which diagonal you are on before you look down. Feel the hind leg engage as you ask for the transition. Specific targets train the nervous system. Vague targets train nothing.

3. Get them off their eyes and onto their seat.
Reactive riders do a lot of riding with their eyes and watching for problems instead of feeling for them. Have your student close their eyes for thirty seconds at the walk around in the rail on a safe school horse, leading them if needed. Ask them what they feel. The shift in awareness is immediate and often dramatic. When the eyes go off the body wakes up.

4. Stop correcting every mistake.
This one is hard for us as instructors because we are trained to fix things but a rider who knows their instructor will call out every drift stops developing their own awareness and starts waiting to be told. Let small moments go but ASK instead did you feel that? What did the horse just do? What did your body do in response? To be clear, you are not ignoring the mistake but you are building the habit of self awareness as an that will eventually make your corrections unnecessary.

5. Lunge line work without reins.
Take the reins away on a quiet horse on the lunge and ask your student to focus entirely on what they feel beneath their seat. No steering to worry about, no contact to manage. Just the horse's movement coming up through the saddle and into their body. Riders who do this regularly develop feel faster than almost any other method.

A rider who can feel the horse is a rider who can fix themselves and that is the goal. Teach them to feel it first so they can learn to become independent riders.

How do you teach feel in your lessons? Drop your best exercise in the comments... I want to hear what's working in your arena!

01/24/2026

Saddle
Club is
ON!

HOLIDAY CAMP 2025!!!
12/18/2025

HOLIDAY CAMP 2025!!!

09/18/2025

Reminder
NO SADDLE CLUB
Sept. 20 or 21
We are going to a show

🐴 JULY SPECIAL 25%🍉All returning campers: 170$ Call Wilton Dennis for information: 803-924-3573
07/03/2025

🐴 JULY SPECIAL 25%🍉
All returning campers: 170$
Call Wilton Dennis for information: 803-924-3573

02/18/2025

2025 SUMMER
CAMP DATES ARE SET
Call (803) 924-3573
for details, brochure, or to register!

2025SUMMER CAMPS
02/18/2025

2025
SUMMER CAMPS

09/14/2024

Today's Saddle Club is cancelled due to weather

08/17/2024

When someone leaves a comments or a like here, I often click on their name to see their riding images on their page. I do this to keep track of what today's typical riding looks like. I see all kinds of riding. Some images and videos show very good balanced riding. What seems to be a common riding flaw that I see recently is with head position. So many riders post pictures of their riding with their eyes looking down. This might seem a minor issue, but it is not.

When your eyes are down, your horse can feel that your balance is forward, more over the forehand. This will put your horse onto their forehand. When your eyes go down, your head that weighs 15 pounds (7 kg) goes down and forward, and usually your shoulders fall forward as well. The fact that your head is up high at the end of an effective lever that is your upper body, multiplies the forward weight that you place over your horse's shoulders.

The negative effects this has on your horse show up in several ways. It makes both upward and downward transitions more difficult for your horse. This is because Horses need to push off or reach under with their hind, and you have shifted their balance off their hind. Lead changes become more difficult for the same reason.

Worst of all for riders, looking down makes it more difficult to develop "feel". I briefly had an argumentative student who insisted on looking down. She would argue with me when I said "eyes up", saying "I like to see what my horse is doing". I'd explain that with eyes up you can feel what your horse is doing and that makes all the difference.

If you look down when riding, just stop doing that. If you have to look down, move your eyeballs, not your head. If you do this, many improvements will follow. You will sit the canter better because your head and neck position will no longer interfere with your hips swinging to the 1-2-3 beat of the canter. "Eyes up". It's simple and fixes a lot of things.

Address

2139 Pierce Boozer Loop
Prosperity, SC
29127

Telephone

(803) 924-3573

Website

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