Training horses for challenging paths

There is a difference between horses who go on trail riding, racing, jumping, dressage, etc. For each of these fields, different kinds of horses are best fit and they need to develop and get trained on certain attributes.

We are in the trail riding field and sometimes especially on long rides we go hard paths. The trail could be long and hard. For example part of the path might be very rocky or slippy, sometimes it gets very narrow as the horse can't put its two feet side by side. There are hills, ups and downs, and like that stuff.

Training horses for trail riding

One way we keep horses ready for harder trail rides is to include some challenging paths in our usual weekly rides. We go through hills, ups, and downs to strengthen our horses. We go on narrow, steep trails to teach them how they should handle those kinds of paths.

Here is one of our rides which was a short 2-3 hour ride. In the middle of the trail, we reached a valley and there was an opportunity to challenge our horses and even ourselves. So we took it. We decided go through the valley which we know it won't be easy.

This was especially good for the foal and also for me. About a month ago there was a less challenging path similar to the above one which I went 2-3 times before with different horses. This time Kajal (horse) slipped and I fell down. It was mostly my fault because I didn't guide the horse well enough. I thought she knew how to go. Fortunately, there was no serious injury to me or Kajal.

This time recalling the last time I was a bit scared so I didn't take my horse myself. I gave it to Fardin and he was the one who took the horses through challenging parts. The trail we went had 2-3 more challenging paths like this and gladly everything went well.

You can see our full trail ride VLOG below.