Podcast host Alexa Linton chats with Tori Jeffress, who spends her days teaching and training according to classical riding principles, bitless and bridleless, with a focus on creating a sound, balanced and willing horse.

A hot humid day. One rider. One horse. Both are exercising at a moderate level. Who is more likely to overheat? It might surprise you to learn that your horse gets hotter much faster than you and is more susceptible to the negative effects of heat stress. Prof. Michael Lindinger, an animal and exercise physiologist at the University of Guelph, explains: “It only takes 17 minutes of moderate intensity exercise in hot, humid weather to raise a horse’s temperature to dangerous levels. That’s three to ten times faster than in humans. Horses feel the heat much worse than we do.”

Elsa Sinclair takes us on a journey into her potent year with her two stallions - and stars of her in-progress documentary Taming Wild Evolution - and shares how Freedom Based training, which she fondly refers to as the slowest training method in the world, is evolving even more and growing in nuance and subtly.

Keys to an effective horse training session. I’ve trained a lot of horses. After nailing up my sign as a “professional horse trainer” several decades ago, I learned quickly that overhead is high in the horse business so you’d better make some hay if you’re going to pay your bills. Consequently, I rode many horses each day, breaking young ones and tuning up show horses.