Sooner or later, it happens.  Maybe you are at the barn and others are about to mount up and ride, or you have been invited by your horse friends to go ride at a clinic or on a trail ride.  You give excuse after excuse so that you don’t have to ride never admitting the real reason.  But you know the truth:  You are afraid to ride.  Perhaps you had a bad fall from your horse or you saw a bad horse accident.  Maybe the fear seems to have come out of nowhere.  All you know is that…

Does your horse just trot faster and faster when you ask it to canter from a trot? Find out why in this interview excerpt with Dawn Hill Adams, Ph.D. about the biomechanics of the trot to canter gait transition.

Most riders echo the sentiment expressed by this high-level professional dressage trainer, who said, “As a riding teacher, trainer and student of ‘the horse’ I’ve searched high and low to understand how to make the horses job easier for them and applicable for my students. Various training methods suggest ‘putting the horses’ head low’, while other say to bring it up. Some…

What if the some of fear and anxiety you have when riding comes from fear and anxiety suffered by your grandparents?  Many of the riders I work with state that they don’t know why they are fearful, just that they are.  Recent research suggests that some forms of fear and anxiety may result from experiences our ancestors had that cause them to be anxious or suffer from…

With New Years Day having just arrived, many people are making resolutions and plans for 2014.  Resolutions and plans such as “I will ride more often this year,” or “ I will be able to do a flying lead change by the end of the year,” abound.  Most people are…

From 2004 – 2007, Dawn and I lived on a ranch in northwestern Nebraska, doing work with our nonprofit.  There was an area at the ranch that had several houses and other buildings, and the main horse pastures were in that area.  The area around the houses had several apple trees that bore many apples each year.  The ranch had high game fence around most of the pastures because…

“What if horses, along with other animals, are trying as hard as they can to find a way to communicate with us in a positive way, but because we’re so stuck on seeing ourselves as ‘superior’ beings, or because we have to feel our theories are right, we don’t even give them a chance? Well, for me, it seems that would be one serious lost opportunity. And I guess that’s an opportunity I’m not willing to let get past me.” — Life Lessons From a Ranch Horse by Mark…

My original plan was to post about Force, Stress, and the Hoof at this point.  In fact, I prepared and (briefly) posted just such a blog entry -- one filled with mathematical calculations and numbers -- on my website.  But I wasn't satisfied with it, for very important reasons.  So the post appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared with changes over a span of several days as I wrestled with my goals for posting it.  It wasn’t a small matter that I put it up to begin with . . .  and it…

The amount of information available about horse hooves and their trimming, shoeing, barefooting, wrapping, booting, soaking, and “orthotic-ing” is mind-boggling.  So the first thing I want you to know in this post is that I’m not going to summarize all that or wade in to the “natural hoof care” debate or encourage you to purchase a product of some sort.  My goal in this post is the same as it is for the blog as a whole: to offer you a different point of view on a subject — one that doesn’t…

You can take the title of this blog as meaning either or both of two things:  horses that are moving (in which case the word “moving” is an adjective), or the things a person does to move a horse (in which case the word “moving” is a gerund).  The two things are related, which will turn out to be the theme of this blog.

This entry is the joint product of two people:  myself as the anatomist and biomechanics scientist, and my business partner Jo Belasco as professional trainer. Jo and…

Sometimes the best way to understand how your horse moves is to mindfully experience how your own body moves.  This is called experiential learning.  When I used to teach comparative anatomy and functional anatomy in the university, I always told my students that the number one tool we all have to understand how animals move is our own bodies.  See if you don’t discover something really cool about horse…

In a very interesting conversation with a trainer whose observations are consistently brilliant, I realized that it’s hard for riders to see the similarities between human and horse gaits.  This is because the vertical position of a human’s torso, due to our being bipedal, changes the orientation of the arms or forelimbs, thereby obscuring their motion.  So I thought it might be useful and interesting to compare the motions of humans and horses, anatomically.…

It seems like such a straight-forward title, “Understanding the Horse.”  Yet if it was easy to do, we wouldn’t have a book, video, clinic, and training industry that’s worth billions of dollars annually.

Two aspects of understanding the horse are represented by the seminars I offer:  how horses stand and move, and how horses relate to humans through story. …