Conditioning ideas please!

[Sheryl]

I would like to see my driving mini push from the rear more and reach under himself better. He is 8, fully trained, has a nice looking frame when driving, but just doesn't have much reach. He is kinda lazy and prefers to do an easy jog over any other gait. He doesn't like backing much which I had thought was a training issue, but I suspect is more of a hind end strength issue.

We drive 3-4 times a week, do hill work and quite a bit of trotting. I have recently been working on backing and doing more gait transitions (walk - trot - extended trot).

 

[hobbyhorse23]

Talk to Lisa.

: Regular dressage work will build their hind ends quite nicely, so will cavaletti work. You can do some basic stretching with him too to try and loosen up his hind limbs. Let him do a lot of galloping in deep footing, roundpen him in deep footing. Kody's hind end didn't free up until he really started stretching down for the bit and doing lengthening and shortening under Lisa's tutelage, but even with that there are a lot of days where he simply won't use his hind end like he should. It's a long process! Have you had Don checked by a chiropractor?

Leia

 

[rabbitsfizz]

What Leia said!!!

I have also found that a Pessoa training aid is brilliant for rear ends- I used one on a ten year old Welsh Cob I worked with (I had already done all the back realigning and continued to do it all through the process- this is VERY important!!) and I managed to partially rectify a lifelong problem with not engaging the rear end.

All to often I see, Minis in particular, but driving horses in general, that have only ever been trained for the show ring, with their rear ends just basically trailing along behind- they do not seem to be taught to engage the rear end at all and it means that when they are sold as harness trained, if not bought by someone like you who notices these things, they are in for a life of back pain heck!!

A real shame and something for anyone buying a harness horse out of the show ring to look out for.

It does seem to be a high percentage- not all by any means- but when you are getting a horse ready to go in the ring in under three weeks a lot of the niceties go straight out of the window- teaching a horse to pull from the back end instead of running ahead of the cart seems to be one of them.

Well done for noticing- you are going to have a much happier horse for it.

Do get a physio to check him out first- there is bound to be issues at his age- then get some exercises form Breanne- you should be able to sort it all out fairly easily.