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The other day I got my husband to snap a few pictures of my Icelandic gelding Vinur. It has been quite a while since I have seen pictures of us together and it is always enlightening to watch afterwards. Also, my husband doesn't know what is good or bad movement so he just keeps his finger on the trigger - literally! 800 pictures later I found a few that I want to share with my thoughts about our training. So here goes.

Vinur is from nature higher in the hind end than in the front end - and thi…

There are many different kinds of riders; In the walk I often see two extremes - people being completely passive and being moved around by the horse or people driving and moving there seat so much that they are actually making it difficult for the horse to move. In the trot, most of the riders I meet, are more to the passive end of the spectre. And very often they are quite unbalanced by the horse's movements as they don't manage to follow it right - most often lacking a little behind the moveme…

The idyllic picture of horses on lush green grass. It looks like they are grazing - but in reality, they are on a dirt track, that you're not able to see due to the tall grass.

To have healthy hooves I believe one of the most important things is to give the horse a healthy diet. Especially if you want barefoot hooves and/or self-maintaining hooves. In this blog post I will discuss my experience in creating a healthy diet and optimizing the horse's barefoot performance. Even if your horse is not…

I am currently reading "Performance Hoof Performance Horse" and thought I would throw in some of my knowledge, experience and opinions. Self-trimming hooves are a bit of a controversial subject. I have been following Rockley Farm's blog (http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/) for many many years now and find the transformations they bring forth in the hooves of horses are amazing. Looking at the pictures you can visibly see a difference after rehabilitation no matter how little you know of hooves. Bu…

The other day I was told how perfect my little Icelandic mare was for trail riding/hacking out and how lucky I was to have such a good horse. No and no! She is far from the perfect horse for trail riding/hacking out and it is not luck that she does so quite well now with me. I have put in so many, many hours of training to get her there. She is actually quite afraid of a lot of the sounds, smells and sights that we meet outside the home grounds so she prefers to stay at home. However, through al…

How much can I train with my horse?

Well, that depends... What do you want to achieve? What are you training? How much training is your horse used to? Does your horse find the training difficult or easy?

You see that the answer will vary in every case. But here you see how this coming week's training plan for Celina looks and why I train what I do. And maybe that will help you make a training plan for your horse.

Celina is young and relatively untrained. She is 5 years this year, and still gr…

Why being mindful when riding will help you progress your training.

Many of us horse riders train towards a goal; it can be a competition goal or just a personal achievement we imagine for ourselves and our horses. This overall goal is not enough in our daily training. We need to break the training down into smaller milestones that we can actually practice at. Yet when I ask riders what their focus for their ride today was, they don’t know.

If we want to progress we need to have an overall goa…

This is going to be one of those long answers that ends up concluding that the whip can be both and that there are a lot of factors to consider. So, we will just get started right away and try the best we may.

Many describe the whip as being an elongated arm, making it possible for us to touch the horse from further away or in places, that we wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise. Thus making it easier to help and guide the horse. And this can certainly be true, that we can use the whip in this f…

Recently a study on hypermobility and the prevalence of knee pain and other symptoms has been conducted. This study was done on humans, just to be clear. Hypermobility is when the joint is able to move into more extreme positions (bigger range of motion) than the standards, based on the general population. In this study they put forth a questionnaire to more than 2000 adults. They looked primarily at two types of hypermobility: General Joint Hypermobility throughout the whole body (GJH) and Knee…

When we own a horse, we are responsible for it. We make most of the decisions for how it should live its life. We choose where it is stabled, what feed it gets and which other living beings it can get in contact with. And sometimes we are thinking of changing some of these conditions by for example moving our horse.

In this blog I want to share some of my thoughts on horse stabling, management and moving horses around. I run a boarding stable and meet many horses who live here for shorter or lo…