Highway Stables

03/21/2024

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Please share with your horsey friends!

03/13/2024

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02/26/2024

This week's Wise Words come from Ernst Hoyos 🗣️

Hoyos learned to ride in his native Austria on his father’s Icelandic ponies and racing Thoroughbreds. At 17, he was accepted at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna where he studied for many years. In 1993, he began working at Olympic Medalist Ulla Salzgeber’s stable in Germany, where the two continue to collaborate. He has worked with many other top horses and riders, including Lisa Wilcox, a U.S. Olympic medalist. Hoyos is featured in David Collin’s book, "Dressage Masters".

02/19/2024

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It takes hundreds of hours of SLOW, methodical work to be able to do the fast things consistently well.

02/15/2024

Please share with your horsey friends!

12/26/2023

You all know my saying, “new direction, new brain” 🧠

When working with your horse, you need to act as if you have two separate horses. Learn more about the Downunder Horsemanship Method and our training resourc...

12/25/2023

Merry Christmas from Highway Stables 🎄 🐴

11/16/2023

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There is a real relationship between the real coaches and the best players.…

10/25/2023

Perfect explanation! 👨‍🍳 💋

Bake the bread!

I have a lot of students in the 1st/2nd level phase where they are really starting to touch on true collection. I think the hardest part of collection is that the rider has to set clearer boundaries and not allow the horses energy to escape and flatten out which can feel a bit restrictive to the rider at times.

I try to explain collection (and roundness in general) as baking bread. When baking bread, as the energy causes the bread to rise the bread has to fill in all the nooks and crannies of the pan. This gives it a round appearance since the “energy” needs to go somewhere but can only expand in certain directions due to the parameters of the pan.

Think of your contact as “the pan” and your leg and seat as the energy used to expand the dough. As the horse learns collection the “pan” gets smaller and smaller and the horse gets rounder and taller.

If you take the exact amount of dough and put one in a smaller pan and one in a longer pan you will end up with two very different loaves of bread. This is the same difference in the outlines of a training level horse and a upper level horse.

Just some food for thought (see what I did there?! 😉)