Bob Wood Horses For Life, Clinics, Remote Pivo Lessons, Video Evaluations, York, PA (2026)

Q: What is the website?

http://www.triplecreekfarmpa.com/

07/30/2026

I guess this is storytelling week. Here is a story from when I was running an Equine Therapy in a locked facility for boys. Back then I went to regional and national conferences regarding this work. I met a lot of people around the country in my travels. At these meetings we'd hang out and talk horses over beers in the evening. My favorite stories are about my impulsive horse purchases that broke my bones and threw me into trees, so I told those stories.

As I planned my travel, I'd contact people that I met doing this work to tell them I would be traveling through their area. One time a couple invited me to stay over at their farm. I didn't know them well and I appreciate the offer.

I arrived at night. The next day after breakfast they told me we could ride to a forest fire over the hill from their farm that nearly had caused them to evacuate, but they were spared. They asked if I'd like to go for a ride and see it. I said sure. They gave me one of their horses to ride and off we went over the hill.

The fire had happened over a year before, but you could still smell a faint odor of charred wood and smoldering ground. At one point the wife asked me how I liked the horse. I said fine, he's a good horse. She questioned me further about any issues I might have observed and I said the horse was a bit sticky to the left in his turns.

Then she told me, to my great surprise, that I was the first rider who had not been bucked to the ground by him. I thought to myself, wow who does this, puts a guest on a horse like that without telling them? I mean these were colleagues in equine mental health work just like me.

The husband laughed and said to her, I told you so. Then he explained that during our late night storytelling sessions at a conference, she thought I was full of s**t with my crazy horse training stories. I think she wanted to embarrass me with this horse. Apparently, he believed my stories and had bet that I'd be fine.

Their bet on the outcome of my ride was pretty sick. I told this story to my equine therapy program's Clinical Director when I returned home. He said that many people take psychology courses and get into mental health programs like equine therapy to learn about their own undiagnosed mental health issues that they unconsciously feel. Good to know. I never contacted those people again.

07/29/2026

After a divorce and selling my farm, I worked at a Hunter show barn. Spoiler alert, I got fired. I taught several group lessons, one with five boys on Wednesday nights. This lesson barn never had a boys group before. We had fun.

Lessons there were stopped when it rained more than sprinkle at this facility because the rain noise on the arena roof was considered dangerous. However, in my boys' group we learned to ride. SO, when it rained, I taught the boys to put their feet out from the sides of their horses, widen their reins and open their shoulders to learn how to ride a reactive horse in a spin or a bolt.

With feet wide, when the horse spins the centrifugal force throws your weight into one of the stirrups and that stabilizes you. The wide reins give extra control over the horse's head in case something strange happens, and open shoulders lets you get your upper body into the center of the spin to stay balanced. It's basic horse trainer riding.

My boys' group was the only lesson on Wednesday evenings. It was just me, the boys and their parents. Some of the boys' horses didn't act up at all from the noise and those students were disappointed as they watched the other boys enjoying dealing with their horses' unpredictability. I even let them switch horses, so everyone experienced a small shy or a modest flight response.

My lessons were far cry from the other barn group lessons taught by younger advance show riders. Since it was evening, I sometimes had the group leave the lighted indoor arena and ride out in the dark. These were older lesson horses dulled by the years. The risk they posed from the rain noise was minimal. Their responses to my changes in their pattern were not worth mentioning. I broke the rules so the boys could have fun really learning to ride.

One night I was teaching the boys how to use a crop because many of the lesson horses were very dull and would not move off the leg. I forbid kicking, so they needed a crop. Occasionally a border would ride in the indoor during a lesson, knowing they had to stay out of our way.

One night there was a teenage kid riding a fancy show horse by herself along with us in the arena. I was teaching the boys how to hold their horse "between the aids". In this case it was between the wall and the crop, so they could apply the leg, supporting their leg aids with the crop. The show girl in the arena yelled out loudly, "That's not right".

I told the teen not to interfere with my lesson, but she persisted. I eventually had to tell the boys to stand and wait while I talked to this girl. I rode over to the show princess and quietly told her to leave because the boys had a right to an uninterrupted lesson. She argued with me, saying that the crop always had to be on the outside so the Judge would not see it. Apparently, this little sweetie had never heard of "between the aids" but knew how to please a judge.

She refused to leave the arena, and I very quietly told her that if she did not leave, I would grab her reins under the bit and snap them until her horse reared, and she would slide down her horse's butt to the ground. I didn't mean it but it worked. She left and I continued the lesson.

The next day I was called to the office by the owner, and she asked me what happened the night before. I explained the whole thing in detail, and her response was, "That family has bought several horses from me". And then she fired me. It was money over education there.

Granted, I am not your usual Hunt Seat show barn instructor, and they did tolerate me for over a year while I trained some difficult horses they had purchased. But my firing typified how the place was run. The students ruled the place as long as their parents paid the big bucks for lessons, transport to shows, and show coaching by the owner, along with their high priced board.

I left there, rented a small farm and started over. My next stop was helping to start the Bucks County Horse Park polo club where I played and gave polo clinics.

07/29/2026

A social license, unlike formal government permits, is "intangible, cannot be regulated, and must be continually earned by building trust, credibility, and social legitimacy." People have fallen for this made up concept and we can't identify all the people who are wielding this amorphous power, but we know PETA is one of them. They intimidated the FEI, that governs the Olympics, into making very extreme rule changes based on their imagined definition of equine abuse before the Paris Olympics.

These people, who know nothing about horses, scared the FEI into extreme changes and having won the Parris battle they are now threatening everything from pony rides to rodeo. They act like some kind of Department of Social Licensing when they are totally unqualified to set standards for the wellbeing of horses.

Horses need to be trained, if not they can become dangerous. Most horses respond well to common training practices, but some do not. I always say that a horse's training is determined by the horse. If they are aggressively dangerous, that has to be addressed in training. However, today the Department of Social Licensing hands out unlimited licenses to horse owners that allows them to drug all horses as a method of stopping supposedly cruel horse training practices. Personally, I don't want to ride a drugged horse any more than I want to ride with a drugged Uber driver.

If we in the US had an equestrian organization that set time tested standards for equine abuse, as governments do in Europe, social licensing people would have to address these standards. But without national standards organizations like PETA make up their own arbitrary standards of abuse.

You would think the US Equestrian Federation would accept this responsibility for universal standards of abuse, but they have a serious dilemma. Several of their affiliate organizations have developed very low standards for equine wellbeing. If the USEF tried to raise the standards of equine wellbeing, the USEF could lose an affiliate that brings a lot of money into the USEF.

The point is that if the horse community does not do something, and soon, about normalized abuse in the disciplines, PETA will ultimately win, and then their goal of "freeing horses from human slavery" will be accomplished. That will be the end of free access to horses as we know it today.

07/28/2026

I am new at posting videos and yesterday I posted two videos in one post. The result was that the first of the two videos about introducing the polo mallet got thousands of views and the second one about hitting the ball got less than 50. So, I'm posting the second one today to give it more exposure.

www.facebook.com/100043468792096/videos/pcb.1710375610421382/1013720481559266

*Here is a link to my "How to" play broomstick polo - www.facebook.com/BobWoodHorsesForLife/posts/pfbid02VwiH2g35SUYz2f76uV9hX5yozXRYfrQfxkAKVppkz3LvBqCDh8CPUNaRVCypPkfvl.

*Link to Arena Polo rules - https://d3uxdg7queknzi.cloudfront.net/assets/pdf/2025-2026-Arena-Rules.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawTVgB5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFRcmhacGpSTlZDcmNwTjE5c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqnBSBgdckLEPnPPXrV4OAWt0P1ZoFEDfigr58P5iA2redbk9EFN42D8qHk3_aem_dVnIEeEymGpkRH9n1MVelw

07/27/2026

I trained a lot of polo horses, mostly Thoroughbreds off the track, during the 25 years that I played the game. The horse in the video is a great mare I got from Turning For Home a Thoroughbred second career placement program that I highly recommend. These videos were taken a few days ago.

I won't make this mare a polo horse, but I do love messing around doing some broomstick polo with prospects just for fun. This is a good way to introduce neck reining to a young horse. It teaches them to focus on a task and it desensitizes them to a very different set of circumstances. For me it brings back some fond memories.

Her registered name is Collective Gold and we call her Velvet. I think her calling is to be a hunt Staff horse. I am moving her to a friend's horse farm where she will be hunted from this coming season. It will be nice to have Velvet at a professional hunt barn with likeminded horsemen. I will put up a post about Velvet hunting in the weeks to come.

Every group of horses and riders can play broomstick polo in an arena. It's fun even at a walk. Here is a link to a post about "how to" do broomstick polo.
www.facebook.com/BobWoodHorsesForLife/posts/pfbid02W7sHKpJpFrxrwb7tk8KajpcWASCYaE2mfPM8r3TDfWAxWZ9jxBme8WMxLvS9cCxMl

07/25/2026

I have a radical idea to address the horses as personal animals vs. horses as livestock ongoing debate. Currently under federal law and biologically, horses are classified as livestock. However, today there is a very large group of people who view and treat horses as personal companions, family members or in other words as pets.

The horses-as-pets crowd is gaining ground toward legally reclassifying horses as personal animals, which has many negative consequences for horses. The worst outcome from changing horses' legal status to pets would be the abandonment of horses' authentic nature. Horses are grazing animals with a very unique digestive system that is contrary to pet feeding standards.

Pets are anthropomorphized as human like. They are overfed, get lots of treats, become obese, which pet owners are proud of, and they do not develop muscle tone. These issues lead to health problems. Overweight horses are subject to Laminitis, Equine Metabolic Syndrome (EMS), Insulin Dysregulation, Osteoarthritis, Joint Strain, Impaired Thermoregulation, as well as Metabolic and Organ Abnormalities. All of these can become very serious health problems. Still, horses-as-pets owners like to see fat horses like an Italian grandmother who overfeeds her family, "Mangia"!

My radical idea to stop this growing trend to reclassify horses as pets is to reclassify horses as exotic animals that require a license or permit to own. Today in the US big cats, such as lions and tigers, all species of bears, non-domestic canines such as wolves and coyotes, venomous reptiles and non-human primates such as monkeys and apes, require some form of license to own on a State by State basis.

If horses must be reclassified as a result of today's Disneyfication of horses, making them pets would be a mistake because the legal standards and practices assigned to pets are bad for horses. The livestock designation is far better, but trendy social license people want it changed to personal animals. However, if the legal designation of horses were changed to exotic animals, the standards for care, management and training of horses could be defined according to how horses really are and how they must be treated for their wellbeing.

Obtaining these licenses requires taking a test to demonstrate that the potential exotic animal owner understands the correct way to keep them and a potential owner must have a license in order to purchase such an animal. If owners don't follow the prescribed standards and practices for the specific exotic animal, they lose their license.

This approach, rather than the pet designation, could improve the treatment of horses as opposed to how the pet destination will ruin horses' lives. Today's "caring" horses-as-pets owners with their overweight underfit horses have brought on new equine health problems like kissing spine that is the result of extreme lack of fitness. Overfeeding has increased cases of painful Laminitis as ignorant horse owners neglect healthy authentic equine care standards.

Yes, this is a radical idea, but I think it might be needed to counter the current culture idea that "mommy knows best" that is causing so many horse health issues today. Please share this post to help start a discussion in the horse community of how to address possible legal reclassification of horses. This is a third option besides the livestock vs. personal animal debate. It might cause people to think.

07/23/2026

This is another small detail of riding that has larger consequences, over posting. When we casually look at the left image, we see a well turned out horse with a rider posting the trot. When we look deeper with an eye of critical horsemanship, we see violations of the principles of unity. The horse and rider do not share the same balance and unified movement.

Some riders may think this is a meaningless detail, however, without the unity of balance and movement, the horse and the rider are moving and balancing separately. The result is the horse must compensate for the rider's separation or disunity. This forces the horse to focus on coping with the external force of the rider's movement instead of on their own movement and balance.

This rider is over posting, meaning pushing their body upward with unnecessary excessive force. The rider's seat is quite high up out of the saddle with the rider's movement out of sync with their horse's movement by the excessive posting. Over posting is contrary to Henry Wynmalen's important axiom, "Let the horse move you".

The blue line is an approximation of the shared or unified center of balance when the rider is over the saddle where unity is best achieved. The pictured over post launches the rider's body ahead of the blue centerline, placing the rider's body mass and weight onto the forehand. The tilt of the rider's head adds to this forward imbalance.

As the rider disrupts any possible unity with their over posting, the resulting disunity of balance and movement can be seen in the shortened reach of the horse's hind leg illustrated by the yellow line. With the rider's weight shifted onto the forehand, the horse must compensate by limiting its hind reach. An oddly extended and imbalanced stride is the result of this forward imbalance.

While the forced energy of an over post is hardly ever addressed in lessons, it can easily lead to an unbalanced horse that can more easily stumble or sometimes fall. Ultimately, if this is how a horse is regularly ridden, the chronically imposed imbalance and separation from the rider's movements can ruin a horse's naturally balanced striding.

The lack of unity seen in this example of over posting is a very common horsemanship problem today. Unity of balance and movement is essential whether you ride English or Western and in a discipline. Every rider can benefit from increasing their awareness and skills to achieve the oneness with their horse in unity.

07/22/2026

I am Bob Wood, first trained to ride by a former US Cavalryman. I worked years on a California ranch in my first paid training job. I have apprenticed with several different discipline horse trainers and competitors.

I have coached two riders to national top ten rankings in the US Eventing Association and US Pony Club. I have successfully competed in a number of different equestrian sports, been a Whipper-in for quality hunts and taught military seat riding for many decades and for years I ran a BHS Pony Club.

I have a substantial social media following that includes professionals and competitors in the US and from around the world. The Cadre Noir in Saumur France alumni page has shared several of my posts.

I retired from my farm and stopped teaching but now I want to return to teaching by offering small basic clinics on a variety of topics and focuses. I live in York PA and would like to teach or give clinics in the region.

Clinic Topics -

HORSE TRAINING

Safety & Desensitization

Training the horse to accept startling or challenging sounds, contact, visual experiences, tasks, socialization with other horses, and more. This clinic decreases rider fear and increases confidence in a rider by providing tools to overcome spookyness in the horse.

Problem Solving

Evaluating and determining the horse's resistance or inability to perform tasks and creating a plan to improve their ability to perform is the focus of this clinic. This work is 90% evaluation and 10% ex*****on of the training. The clinic teaches how to evaluate and execute training more effectively through leadership.

RIDING

Defensive Riding

Today we have a number of disciplines that teach artificial unbalanced methods of riding based on style and trends that judges reward. This clinic focuses on undoing these flawed techniques that individual riders have discovered to be ineffective and unsafe.

Small "d" dressage & flatwork

This clinic teaches fundamental movements universal to all disciplines based on biomechanics. The clinic work includes CORRECT transitions, extension and collection in all the gaits, bending a horse in a turn, lateral movement, and developing unity of balance and movement with a horse in order to move beyond being a passenger and onto sharing the same balance with one's horse.

Gymnastics

This clinic is about developing increased balance, stability and awareness in riders by learning riding techniques based in work with different rhythms and striding that increase a rider's range of responses to changes in the horse's movements.

www.youtube.com/

http://www.triplecreekfarmpa.com

07/20/2026

This image probably looks good to many riders, but it is not. Real self carriage is when a horse moves in a relaxed symmetrical "frame" with both the forehand and the hind swinging freely together in centered balance.

In this picture we see the opposite. The cranked down, over flexed poll acts like a cork bottling up the horse's hind energy as it moves. This forced artificial "frame" that is being imposed on the horse holds back the hind's energy and it impedes relaxed hind reach. We see evidence of this restrained hind energy in the distance between footfalls 1 and 2.

There is no frame of self carriage here. If the horse was balanced in true self carriage, the distance between footfalls 1 & 2 would be zero. It is not zero because the restriction of the forced poll flex is creating braced resistance throughout the horse's body. This prevents the hind from engaging softly but powerfully.

By contrast, when we coax a horse into relaxing their poll, the hind naturally wants to push forward to maintain symmetrical balance, and the hind legs then swing forward in reciprocal hind-forehand balanced movement with suspension. In the picture we see some suspension but there could be much more if more freedom of movement was allowed.

The yellow arrows show the direction of the forces applied by the rider that have cranked down the horse's head and neck. Arrow "A" shows how the rider is employing the saddle's thigh blocks to obtain greater leverage on the bit to amplify the force shown by arrow "B". Arrow "C" shows how the force of the pull on the reins has moved the rider's upper body forward. Combined, this is the energy the rider imposes on the horse in order to create the artificially flexed poll that has the head tucked behind the vertical.

For me this is a picture of coercion made possible by a saddle design that gives the rider increased mechanical advantage over the strength of a horse. Instead of the head and neck giving way to the power of a driving hind with natural reach, we see the opposite.

The power determining the movement in this image comes mostly from the rider not the horse. We see the rider tensing their horse's entire body, starting at the mouth and continuing all the way back to the hips.

Restricted hind reach is the first thing we see from a horse controlled by a rider's force. This horse is trying hard to move correctly in spite of the rider blocking the horse's hind power. We see this effort in the horse delivering some suspension. If the rider would relax, the horse's movement would be much lighter.

I always forget to tell people I have a YouTube channel. I don't post there often but it has good info. www.youtube.com/

07/19/2026

One of the unusual pleasures of riding a horse is a moonlight ride. On a full moon night, after the sun has completely set, the world changes. Animals come out to live their nocturnal lives. Deer graze in large herds in meadows and if you ride slowly you can ride amongst them because the horses hide your human scent.

When the temperatures rise to an uncomfortable level, a moonlight ride can be very cool. You will hear sounds you have never heard before when riding and you will see new things as the horses move along in the forest.

The moon shadows can spook a horse that is new to night riding. Most horses are used to being out at night but some need to learn about being ridden in the dark. It is best to have some horses in a group that have moonlight ride experience. They tend to keep the newer horses calm with their relaxed attitude. When I take a group out into the night I have them ride close together to use their herd bonding impulse to keep things steady.

If you want to try this, I suggest that you start slow. After dark maybe ride first in the outdoor arena without any artificial lighting. Then as the horses learn and the riders get comfortable, branch out a little and ride around the barn and other familiar places. Build confidence in the riders and the horses before you head out into the woods and fields.

Like anything else with a horse, new things require new training. Take it slow and remember that the cavalry did regular night training for night missions. For them it was just another part of riding.

Bob Wood Horses For Life

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