Single Pole Challenge – a Horse Ground Pole Exercise
We can often get bored training the same exercises, going in the same circles as we ride.
This single pole challenge is a new and fun ground pole exercise you can try with your horses today!
What is the Single Pole Challenge?
This ground pole challenge looks deceptively easy – simply walk the horse down the length of the pole – right feet on the right side, left feet on the left!
Begin this on the ground, but you can also try it under saddle.
If your horse gets on one side or the other you can back them up, bring them forward and circle around to try again, or try to push them laterally.
Why Do This Challenge?
So this challenge is awesome for a number of reasons!
One of the best reasons to try this exercise is that it requires your horse to place his feet in specific places – a matter of inches. This means your aids have to be specific.
I know a lot of us (myself included!) tend to “talk” to our horses at one “volume”.
We use the same amount of pressure all the time to get the results we want.
However, doing this does not let us refine our aids to be almost imperceptible – an indication of excellent training.
You’ll see in the video below that at one point I ask Rumi too “loudly” and he puts both feet over the pole instead of just one.
In addition to helping you to refine your aids, it is an excellent form of proprioceptive training.
Proprioceptive training is training your brain to understand where your body and limbs are in the space around you.
A football player will train his cardiovascular fitness by running sprints, train his muscles by weight-lifting and his proprioception.
This let’s him leap through the air and grab a ball by his fingertips – because he knows exactly how long his arm is and how his body will fly through the air when he jumps.
For horses, this looks like knowing where their feet are and where to place them.
Naturally, a horse doesn’t think about this.
He sees something scary, so he runs in another direction.
He doesn’t think about where he needs to place his feet in order to run away.
Asking him to think about his feet is a foreign concept for most horses.
In addition to being a new concept, horses cannot see underneath them.
Because their eyes are on the sides of their eyes, they cannot see directly in front of them, nor underneath them.
So they can’t see where their legs are, they must think about where their legs are.
Why do we care if our horses know where their feet are? Besides knowing how to step carefully over branches or rocks during a trail ride, when we ask a horse to perform a canter depart, it begins with his inside hind leg.
He needs to know where his inside hind is to be able to use it to perform a canter depart on the correct lead.
Give this challenge a try! It’s a fun way to mix up your ground training!
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