Most of us intend for our daily rides to improve our horse at some level, either by adding to his physical conditioning or progressing his training skills. But whether or not your horse actually makes these gains often comes down to the amount of time you spend on each phase of the ride. The format of your ride determines the outcome of physical improvement.

One of the simplest ways to improve athletic output is to ride your horse at different speeds within every gait throughout each week. Moving through a range of gears stimulates the neuromuscular system to create fuller metabolic function within muscles.

Sharing Costs, Spreading Risks - Racehorse syndicates have been around for a long time, but it’s only in the last 20 years that sport horse syndicates have become more common. In the horse world, a syndicate is generally a group of people who pool their funds to invest in a horse together and share the horse’s annual costs. Everyone who “buys in” is a shareholder and owns a portion of the horse for a set period of time, or until the horse is resyndicated or sold.

With Sarah Bradley - “Straightness refers to how the horse positions his body, and his ability to use both sides of his body evenly, providing even propulsion from both hind legs and carrying even weight on both front legs. It's about the rider’s ability to place the horse’s body on the line the rider wishes to travel. A horse is straight when the bird’s eye view shows the horse’s spine as being directly on the line of travel. Thus, a horse on a circle is ‘straight’ when it compresses the inside of its body and lengthens the outside, so that its spine follows the circle.”