Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride teaching a clinic at Peppertree Farms in Poway, CA. I am here with Judith Bailey who is a beginner and has ridden in three clinics with me so far. In that short period of time, she has been able to get her horse stretching into the contact and moving and swinging over it’s back. We are very proud of her!

The point of me showing this is you can see with even a beginner, once you understand these concepts, you can begin stretching your horses and getting them working over their backs so they will develop correctly. Not only does it develop the horse correctly, it develops the rider correctly as well because the rider cannot balance against the reins. It teaches the rider to stretch up and get into the right position …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here with my good friend Bailador, who you’ve seen in previous videos before. Today I thought I would spend a little time talking about horses that spook.

Very often in horses that come to us we find (and especially the big and powerful ones) that they have gotten into the hands of riders that are not very experienced who are afraid of them, and they begin to spook at every little thing. Pretty soon they can’t go around the ring without spooking ten times, and then they start dumping people. So now I am going to explain how you deal with it.

One of the things that I want to point out is relaxation (like doing a shoulder in or a half pass), it is a skill that we have to …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we have been introducing you to our new horse in training, Bailador!

This is about the fifth time I’ve lunged him. He is used to having his head tied down and would brace upward and tighten. This is a horse that used to spook at every little sound and would jump out of his skin, and like so many other horses today is only half trained. If everything is perfect, this horse will kind of go along okay but as soon as something goes wrong he was ready to jump out of his skin and buck. After only a few days, he is already starting to relax and stretch into the contact. Notice how long I have the side reins on this horse, just like we have shown you in other videos. …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here with my lovely wife Karen Loshbaugh coming to you from Whitehouse, Ohio. We are going to show you an update on this horse Jubal. There is another video on our website at: www.art2ride.com of this horse when we first started stretching him about 8 months ago which you can go back and compare. Jubal has been basically stretching for about 8 months. We are going to bring Jubal up and see how he does.

If you notice in our last video he looked almost like a Draft horse: very heavy and very pendulous through the belly and also very heavy through his feet. If you look at the two videos of him comparatively you will see he has become a much more active horse. He is able to come up into …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here in Poway doing a clinic. We have Laura Sakakeeny in the ring with us this morning and she came to our last clinic that we held here. Her horse was a Hunter before we started this and neither her horse or she had ever done much dressage. I saw her about 6 weeks ago and since then she has put what she has learned into practice.

Look how beautiful her horse looks now!  She has done it all on her own getting her horse stretching. Look how beautifully this horse is working over it’s back now! Once you understand the basic principles that must guide you, you can train your own horses. Laura demonstrates a stretch for us on a circle and this direction is a little more difficult to …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here in Orange County today with Tanya and her horse Soleil. Soleil has been working with me for about six months now. Soleil started out not so good and unsound due to bad feet and a bad back. I wanted her to help you a little bit today.

We had a question come in asking for help: “I feel my horse stretching down but it feels like it’s on the forehand”. It’s going to feel a little on the forehand in the beginning but the main thing is whether the horse is swinging through behind or not. That will tell you whether or not the horse will develop correctly or not. Tanya has just begun to be able to do this and today is actually the first day that she …

Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here with my wife Karen and the horse Contigo.

Contigo is a Holsteiner stallion who unfortunately developed a foot infection when he was very young, so he was never really able to train more than a couple months before his feet would blow apart. We have been rehabbing him for about three years now with many thanks to our Master farrier Kenny Lyon (who I will do another video on next time he is here explaining the process he has gone through with him).  This horse is now going to be twenty years old this year! After three years of rehabbing, he is back to looking like a four year old. He is going absolutely beautifully, stretching into the contact as you can see there, and look how his back end is moving.

When we started …

Good morning, this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here with Jodi Anderson and her horse Casanova. We had a question come in a couple days ago from someone who is working their horse and developing and they wanted to know how to recognize if the horse is developing it’s topline.

It is quite simple because you will see the topline change. By topline I mean the point in the middle of the horse’s ears all the way back to it’s tail. If you look at the horse in the video, you can see how the top of his neck muscles are lit up and the bottom of his neck muscles look very soft, but he’s reaching out from the shoulder. Look how evenly his diagonal pairs are moving (the outside hind leg with the inside foreleg), that is …

Good morning, this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we are looking at Karen Loshbaugh riding our new project horse, who is still unnamed! We are still looking at names for him!

We are about two weeks into this project and as you can see when you compare this to our first frames that we did of the horse, he now looks like he is moving pretty much consistently on both sides. There is no dropping of his hips anymore or losing the back end and he is starting to work through his back! We can still see from having been draw reined in his life that he still wants to crimp over the neck just a little bit, but the neck is starting to get out longer and longer all the time.

We can see he has got more swing in his back …

This is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I’m here today with our student Kristen Balch who is lungeing the horse Contigo. We had a question come in on the internet yesterday, a person trying to learn how to stretch their horse and when she stretches her horse, the horse curls back behind the vertical. How can this be remedied?

Now usually that tells me that the horse has been broken at the third vertebrae in the neck or at least has been loosened there by use of draw reins or something like that during the course of his life. That is something that we find very often when we first go to stretch the horses, they curl back behind the vertical because their neck has a bend in it already. In other words, it’s already crinked over in the middle, so …