Training your horse; basics of Longeing
Posted By Iris on March 3, 2010
Longeing is often underestimated or seen as ‘only necessary for young horses’. But on the contrary! Longeing is a very important tool not only to teach the horse rhythm and forwardness but also to establish a certain communication and connection with your horse. Besides all this it is also a very good way to see whether your horse has problems with stiffness or soundness or not. With longeing your horse gets the chance to get rid of excess energy (without you in the saddle), you re-establish your leadership and it is a good training to get your horse suppler every day. When you longe every time before you sit on your horse you will already have a better connection with him before riding and he will be correctly warmed up. Nothing but advantages…
At Barbier farm I longe some of the horses every day for twenty minutes (or so) and every time before I ride. When we longe we follow three aids in asking the horse to do something (if the first step does not work, we use the second and so on):
1. With thought; we visualize what we want from the horse (see my article about telepathy)
If that does not work:
2. We use a small reinforcement like clicking with the tongue
If that does not work:
3. We use the whip
The more you train your horse this way the less reinforcement he will need and eventually you will be able to just use aid no 1.
When we longe we longe with a sur-single or a saddle, and sidereins. We start trotting the horse without sidereins for warm-up. Mostly 5 minutes on both sides. It is important that the horse is very much forward. This will bring the hind leg under. When the horse is forward we will ask him to relax, when the horse relaxes you will often see him lower his head.
When you have a young horse it is good to do a lot of transitions from walk to trot, with more advanced horses though we keep them trotting, we try to let him find relaxation in trot.
When the horse is warm we will attach one (!) siderein. (Young horses will be longed without sidereins) When you just start the horse on sidereins (or one in our case) you start the siderein low and long, the more advanced the horse gets, the higher and shorter the siderein gets. It is very important though that the siderein is never to short (whatever height) but also not to long for the horse will lock up some of its muscles and of course he won’t be able to find relaxation and on the long run you can damage the horse. We want the horse trotting long and relaxed strides and lowering his head. Of course if the horse does not have a good day, pushing him will be useless, you will go for the best you can get, there is always tomorrow.
The reason we mostly use one siderein is because the Barbiers have found the horses are better able to find relaxation with one rein as opposed to being ‘locked’ in two sidereins.
With Classical Dressage we will never use artificial methods to train the horse. In other words, we are looking for relaxation and with that the horse will collect and carry his head ‘on the bit’. We will never force the horse ‘on the bit’ by putting its head in a certain position and then hope the horse will be collected. Unfortunately this is often seen in ‘modern Dressage’, even on high level competition.
If you are new to longeing, please longe under supervision of a more advanced longer as you can damage your horse whit improper longeing, both physically and/or mentally!
(The term ‘on the bit’ is actually an incorrect translated term from the French term ‘on the aid’. Because of that term a lot of people actually think that ‘being on the bit’ has something to do with the bit and using the bit to put the head in a certain position… maybe an interesting topic to write something about in a later article…)
[...] routine she is warm for work on the longe. I now put on one siderein on the inside (read about sidereins and why I use just one on the inside) obviously I did not use sidereins when I just started her; I [...]