Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here in Orange County with Devon and her project horse Oxsana.

When we first began working with Oxsana she was having some problems from an old injury on her ankle and issues with her saddle fit. She was sore in the shoulders and every time the saddle would hit her she would look like she was off. Happily we have come a long ways since those days which we will show you now.

Devon is going to keep her in a stretch and go into a rising trot. We ask for a little more swing in her trot so that she will swing through a little more in the rising trot. Now it looks quite even. Now to develop her working trot she will bring the poll up, finding that place …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride here with Kristen Balch for our second Q&A session. The question that came in is: Is dressage appropriate for gated horses?

I grew up in Kentucky where people raised Thoroughbreds but rode Tennessee Walkers and saddle bred horses. I grew up all around saddle bred horses and have retrained many of them over the years to be riding horses, dressage horses, jumpers and even some hunters in the hunt field. The first thing that you have to understand about gaited horses is you cannot have a gaited horse and do dressage because it won’t work. What gaiting horses means is to create artificial gaits not the natural three gaits. Dressage is all about perfecting the three natural gaits of the horse, that is why in correct dressage the cardinal rule in the trot for …

Good morning this is Will Faerber and Karen Loshbaugh from Art2Ride and we are coming to you from our clinic in Whitehouse, Ohio. Karen will now show us a little saddlefitting demonstration since we have had so many requests for it on our website.

Yesterday when we watched this horse it couldn’t move because the saddle was impeding the horse’s movement, especially in the shoulders. As a trainer, the last thing we want to do is make it difficult for the horse to perform what we are asking of him. They become unhappy and resentful because we are asking them to lift their back and carry themselves when their saddle is restricting them from doing that, which can be quite painful for them. So if you hit on certain areas of the horse’s back (which we call negative reflex points), the horse …

Hi this is Will Faerber and Karen Loshbaugh from Art2Ride here with our horse Zoolander. Today we are going to start our Q&A sessions on video. We have been answering a lot of questions from people who view our videos around the world by typing them out and I thought it would be much more informative if we had a dialogue about the question itself.

The first question is: How do you get the horse on the bit? I think for a lot of people it is really confusing and I remember going through this stage too. How much pressure do you have? Should it be the weight of the rein? Should it be 20lbs of pressure? So the basic question is: How do you get a horse on the bridle? What you have to understand is what has to take …