Blogs

We kept on progressing!

After spending a few weeks doing the work in hand, I started introducing the lunging again. Without a chambon and sidereins. Just to see if we could bring some of that relaxation into the trot. You can see she is still not completely relaxing and stretching the topline, b...

I felt like giving up. After 6 months of lunging with barely any results I started to loose the fun of working with her. I gave her 2 months off during the summer where she could spend some time in the field. I had my hands full on the showseason with my Quarter mare Nikki. I was teaching a lot, spe...

Things were rusty and it made me feel down. I started to accept that I might not ever be able to ride this horse again. Though I knew I had bought a projecthorse, I felt like a failure that things weren't working out the way I wanted to. The opposites were huge. While Nikki was thriving, Pura was ju...

After 3 months of struggling with the riding I had enough. The osteopath had come back and she was still super sore on her back muscles. We took a look at her saddle and it turned out her saddle did not fit at all. A huge part of our problems came from that. Unfortunately my stubborness had also cau...

The first visit of the new instructor felt a bit strange. She first wanted to see Pura without a saddle to see how she looks. This was the first time anyone had said that to me, but it really showed me a new level how to approach a horse when you come for the first time. She explained to me that Pur...

After discovering Pura her back was sore I had a new mission. Training her back muscles to become stronger. Little did I know how hard this was. I sat myself down behind my computer and started googling 'how to train the back muscles of the horse'. As it turned out there was no clear information on ...

So I started running into some problems with Pura. But the weird thing was that she was totally fine hiking out. So while I was having issues with the normal training, we could go to the natural park and ride for 3 hours and she was totally fine.

I really felt confused. How is it possible that a...

3 months after Pura had her baby we started training her. There were a bunch of kids at the yard happy to ride her and I trained her on the side. During this time I started noticing that my Quarter Horse Nikki really liked her. This was quite special because Nikki wasn't too crazy about socializing ...

After buying Pura things already started to become more of a puzzle. She behaved differently under the western saddle compared to the dressage saddle. She wasn't really jumpy or dangerous. But very forward and behind the bit. The canter was a struggle, she lacked a lot of balance and I tried to guid...

I met Pura at a small farmers yard in a small village near Amsterdam. After coming back to the city from working with a high level reining trainer I boarded my Quarter Horse named Nikki there. It was cheap, had an outdoor arena and most importantly.. 24/7 field time in the summer. It was time for Ni...