So I’ve been reading through the pages of Buck and his yellow card and the warm up antics of Be Mine. I currently own a horse that can be “cheeky” in the warm up. Some days he’s cool, calm, and collected and others he’s a complete lunatic. Biggest problem is that you never know when or where he’s going to be anxious. So here’s my question for others with similar horses - what kind of things have worked for you to defuse a potentially bad situation? I’m looking for tools to put in my tool box to try at shows - he’s almost always good at home and when trailering out to lessons. Just shows and usually in the jumping warm up more than dressage. TIA!
My current horse is green (just starting to do Novice). His big trigger is other horses galloping/ jumping, especially on xc, so often at smaller events or if I am at the beginning or end of the division I know I’m less likely to have a problem. If he’s bad I will jump one or two fences and then move away from the action as much as possible and walk or trot in circles until it’s my turn to go. I do not ever let him stand still if I can feel his back is tight, since if he’s going forward he’s less likely to blow up. I’ll also ask the starter to let me go early if possible, and stress that my horse is being naughty-- I’ve outgrown being proud. I’ll also be proactive about asking people not to get too close, just in case, although the risk is mostly me getting dumped.
My guy is most likely to take off/ buck, and mostly on the landing side of a jump, although he can also be bad in the dressage warmup if he can see xc going. Luckily he is starting to realize dressage saddle= no fun and be much calmer when wearing it.
Keep him away form the crowd as long as possible, if the venue allows it, try to do some gallops to burn off steam, go do the minimum amount of jumps then get to the start box. Try to get him to stretch and let his head down instead of holding him in a death grip, which is instinctive for me. All of this, of course, goes out the window for a delay on course which fills up the warmup area, a small warmup area or a loose horse comes galloping thru the warmup and everyone has a come apart. That’s only happened to me once but I was advised that next time I should turn my horse toward the oncoming runaway and it won’t be so bad.
I’ve warmed up youngsters wherever I can if they are sensitive & the warm up is tight/busy. Into the warm up, over 1 fence & off we go. I’d rather that than frying both our brains trying to achieve relaxation in an impossible situation.
Lots of walking to loosen up muscles, trotting to settle them etc.
I am mostly a jumper rider but frankly I had a horse that would easily give Be Mine a run for his money any day, and I used to go in the 4’6 divisions on a little trotting and two jumps. one vertical and one oxer at height. I walked around the grounds a lot beforehand away from the show where it was totally quiet.
This plan is not unusual for show jumpers, the super hot ones. the more you do in warmup, the more worked up they get. They are often better in the ring alone.
Do as much warm up as you can anyplace other than the warm up area! Get as much as you can do in quiet places.
Where and when you can pull it off, a quiet, easy 10 minute canter can work wonders.
My daughter’s horse is very horse-shy and a busy warm up arena is a disaster waiting to happen. She avoids them as much as she can.
But it is hard because oftentimes there is no where else to properly warm up for the dressage. Showjumping and xc aren’t so bad because the horse is very good in both those phases and sometimes jump 1 and 2 ARE the warm up! Not ideal, but like Feliz said it’s often the best option. Lucinda Green gave her the same advice.
I always go along to the marshal, explain the issue and act as a go between so she is ready to go when called but not in the mix while waiting. Most marshals are great, but you get a few who don’t care and don’t want to be helpful. That makes it tough.
I wish I knew the answer to this question. We have tried protecting him, exposing him, latest plan was sending him off to a pro (also my daughter’s xc coach) who knows the horse really well to take him out and compete him. She put him in the mix and basically just told him to get on with life and deal with it. They did 3 events in a row.
So far, he’s remembering the lessons. Doing this also gave my daughter some ideas of what works and doesn’t work. Mostly she learned that the horse can cope with a lot of pressure from the rider and pretty much keep his act together. She gained a bit of confidence from watching, from seeing that it wasn’t just her as he was an idiot with the pro as well, and that confidence is helping a lot.
The unexpected positive was that the horse WAS a loon with the pro. All the fence birds who had been thinking “nice horse, too bad the YR can’t ride it” saw just how difficult he can be and just how well my daughter does deal with him. LOL It was worth the money we paid to have him competed by the pro just for that!
If you’re at a busy barn rider them in group lessons for a while. We used to take all the horses off the track or that had issues and me or the other assistant trainer would ride them in two or three kids group lessons a day until they died of boredom. (ETA: we weren’t endangering kids, these were walk trot lessons and we made sure they were broke first) Then we’d have older kids ride them in lessons till they not only died of boredom but it became a zen state whereby a pony running up their butt was a welcome change. Then we stuck them in teenage/ amateur jumper or basic eq/ arena lessons where they were expected to be so well behaved it wasn’t funny. I used to take 4 or 5 eq lessons a day on various idiots. By eq I mean in the arena and focused on the rider, not all these people showed eq or anything. I had legs of IRON. It never fails and is really a long term fix.
Short term ideal fix is draw reins, imho but that’s not legal anymore so I’ll go with warming up someplace that is not the warm up. If you need to be in an FEI warm up area than see paragraph 1, above.
For these horses, it’s all about picking the appropriate venue.
I had one that could be quite explosive when he was greener, and I always carefully selected which events we would do. His trigger was people cantering/galloping behind him. He was a race-horse, and it took a lot of work to train him out of it. For most horses, I think it is very possible to eventually acclimate them to crazy rings, but it does take time.
Some events just have frenetic atmospheres, while others are much more low key: a good example is GMHA - I think the atmosphere there in the show jump/XC warm-up can be absolutely chaotic, and for a nervous or trigger horse, it can be really dangerous and overwhelming.
In contrast, Stoneleigh Burnham (which is also in Area I) has a similar number of entries but I never felt that the warm-ups were claustrophobic there. Which is funny, because the warmup is usually smaller. I think the terrain plays into it as well.
I had one that was a lot like Be Mine (in terms of quirks, NOT talent :lol:) and the best thing to do was warm up away from the warm-up. We’d get on and take a stroll all around the trailering area, to and from warm up, back and forth back and forth until the feeling was ho-hum instead of bottle-o-keg. Many times I didn’t actually enter the warm-up ring until I was close to ride time.
Obviously, it helps to school these horses to these ‘claustrophic’ opportunities before-hand. That is where I think going to an unrecognized/local schooling show is much more beneficial… In my area we have one local show that runs 2-3x a year and you cannot find a more chaotic warm-up ring… Once one of ours settles into that atmosphere I know the bigger venues are going to be no problem.
I’m not an eventer, so you can take my story with a grain of salt as it relates to h/j shows. But I have a TB who was a huge pain to ride with other horses for the first 4 or 5 years that I showed him. If another horse misbehaved or touched a jump in warmup (the sound of hitting a fence whether it came down or not) we were off to the races! Well, off to the races if racing involved bolting blindly and becoming a hazard to others in the ring and, of course, me!
So the story of our warmup was often that he walked out of it anxious, hot, and lathered up. It would take the first few fences of our jumping rounds for him to start evening out again. And years of trying to expose him to the chaotic environments every chance we got did nothing but continue to wind him up (admittedly, we weren’t able to practice that as frequently as it would probably take).
I finally decided to forego the warmup and it made his life so much happier. I would get him out and walk him around the show grounds for 30 minutes before the class and when it got close to our time I’d walk him around closer to the ring until they called us. Then we’d head straight in to fence one. He stayed calm, focused, and relaxed with that program. As someone above mentioned, fences 1 and 2 were his warmup fences.
Initially (and at the lower levels) I felt that it wasn’t a big deal because the jumps were so easy for him that he really didn’t need to warm up beyond literally warming/loosening up his muscles after standing around in a stall. But I continued the program through his first year in the 1.40m and then 1.45m and 1.50m classes/prixes. There was one venue where the warm-up footing was completely different than the grass show ring, and so even when he started getting better about being around other horses, I still would go up to a big grass area above the ring and do a 30-minute flat warmup up there and then would walk straight into the ring (much to my own terror, as I felt I needed to jump some big fences before cantering to big jump #1).
Now he’s 15 and we’ve been jumping around the shows for almost 10 years. I would say in the last few years he’s finally gotten better about not reacting to other horses in normal chaotic situations. But I still run into issues in crowded arenas, and if another horse misbehaves (bucking, squealing, etc.) he absolutely loses his marbles as though he’s totally offended that another horse would dare do that! We just got home from a show where FEI week left us crammed in the schooling ring with what felt like all 90 FEI horses at once and I felt like we had been transported back to his 6yo year :sigh:. So I finally gave up and went for a long trail ride.
So I do agree that picking your venue can be important. But even at the more hectic venues, maybe there’s a way to find another space to do what you need to do? I’m not familiar enough with eventing venues to know how they control where you can go, but I can say that the only time I ran into problems at the h/j shows in our no-warmup-days was when we were showing FEI and weren’t allowed out of the supervised space. There were a few shows where I had a maybe 60x100 “viewing area” to walk around until we went in. Not ideal, but it worked well enough.
Isn’t this sort of a gray area in the rules? It seems like it would be dangerous to have people riding around trailer parking, etc in an effort to avoid the warm up ring. I guess I never thought to check the rules to see if it was explicitly prohibited, though.
I did the same things with my mare who had a pretty big personal space bubble. I also spent some time with her in hand hanging out near the warm up areas, a safe enough distance that she wasn’t worried, then closer as she got more comfortable. Once there was a XC fence on the edge of the SJ warm up so we stood behind that - she was right near all the action, but the fence protected her from feeling that another horse was going to come near her at speed.
She was never great about it, but she did get better.
Mine can be a nightmare in small or large warm ups depending how many horses are in there and what is going on outside the ring. If I can I just let him gallop on for a bit - that seems to help. I do a couple of jumps quickly just to make sure he knows jumping is the plan and then go hide in a quiet corner until it’s our turn to go. I make darn sure he is on my aids to jump one and 2 in stadium and XC since I can’t have a last fence before we go. I have started disciplining his behavior and kick him forward when he threatens to sull up and leap around. That has actually worked surprisingly well.
[QUOTE=soloudinhere;8700974]
Isn’t this sort of a gray area in the rules? It seems like it would be dangerous to have people riding around trailer parking, etc in an effort to avoid the warm up ring. I guess I never thought to check the rules to see if it was explicitly prohibited, though.[/QUOTE]
An interesting POV. Do you get on in the warm up ring, or do you ride there?
I think it depends on knowing your venue. Me, I know most of the venues I ride at like the back of my hand (it’s why I pick them :winkgrin:) so I know what areas are okay for riding and which are not.
For instance, to expand on one of the venues I mentioned above, GMHA - their second or third parking lot is a half the mile down the road; it’s a decent hike on foot. It’s the perfect distance for a nice w/t warm-up. Not a lot of people like parking down there because it can really be a hike for all three phases, but if you’re not there early you don’t really have a choice… The back is usually semi empty and I usually see at least two or three riders warming up back there.
It’s not unusual here if the parking area is big enough. People lunge in it, too.
Thanks everyone for the great suggestions! He tends to be better at smaller venues (no shock there) but he’s been known to fly off the handle at those too:) Richland SJ warmup is by far his worst - with SJ and XC going on at the same time can be a little more than his brain can handle (my trainer rode him in 2014 there and handled him really well. I rode in 2015 and although not a catastrophe it was not pretty). I have an event this weekend which is on the smaller side and has a separate warm up area near the stabling so maybe I’ll try warming up a little there before heading over to the real warm up.
[QUOTE=Highflyer;8699744]
My current horse is green (just starting to do Novice). His big trigger is other horses galloping/ jumping, especially on xc, so often at smaller events or if I am at the beginning or end of the division I know I’m less likely to have a problem. If he’s bad I will jump one or two fences and then move away from the action as much as possible and walk or trot in circles until it’s my turn to go. I do not ever let him stand still if I can feel his back is tight, since if he’s going forward he’s less likely to blow up. I’ll also ask the starter to let me go early if possible, and stress that my horse is being naughty-- I’ve outgrown being proud. I’ll also be proactive about asking people not to get too close, just in case, although the risk is mostly me getting dumped.
My guy is most likely to take off/ buck, and mostly on the landing side of a jump, although he can also be bad in the dressage warmup if he can see xc going. Luckily he is starting to realize dressage saddle= no fun and be much calmer when wearing it.[/QUOTE]
My guy is very similar and this is exactly what I’ve adopted, and it seems to help.
I have tried the “bring him to shows and have him stand in busy warm ups” thing - sometimes it helps, and sometimes it just makes it worse.
This approach that you have described seems to work for us.
I dread nothing more than a chaotic warm up with dozens of horses careening around, often a long time before they need to go - just makes things more crowded.
My drafty boy isn’t HOT, but he can be a turdface at shows. Basically, if he feels even a hint of nerves from me and there are a lot of horses in the warmup, he’ll blow me off and start to not turn and threaten to run into fences/horses/people, as he has NO self-preservation. It’s just a game he plays.
So i’ve taken the route now that the warmup is actually for his brain, not his body. Lots of walking small circles, etc. Halting. Not much cantering, and we usually don’t take many warm-up jumps at all for stadium, and none for XC.
Standing still for him is also bad, as he just starts dancing around when he’s in these moods. When he’s not in these moods, he just stands like a slug with his head hanging to the ground. :lol:
I teach all of my horses to go stand quietly at the rail. I sometimes practice this at small hunter schooling shows so, at the very least, the horse can stand at the rail with other horses and relax.
I also have learned to tack up really early (if it is possible) and do as much warm-up away from the warm-up area, then slip in when it is quiet, jump a couple of fences and then leave if it gets busy again.
It depends on the schedule though!
When he was competing, mine was an embarrassment for the first 5 or so minutes of warm-up, then he was ok. But that first 5 minutes got us on the ‘watch list’ of several warm-up ring stewards, who would ask me ‘are you sure you can control him?’ and then later be spotted whispering in the ear of another official while giving us the stink-eye. I don’t think Horse was that awful on The Scale of Awful, and wondered if they had seen REALLY Awful. I suspected part of the concern was that it was the ammy division, and they would have reacted less if he had done the same thing with a pro.
[The Scale of Awful from 1 to 10, where 1 = Eh and 10 = You Shouldn’t Be Here. My horse started at about 5 = Pill, brief escalation to 6 or 7, then ceased being Awful.]
Horse registered a strong initial objection to a lot of horses pounding around the warm-up. He didn’t like being in the crowd, at first, but with a few minutes to settle, he would adapt beautifully.
But at the beginning it was head up like a giraffe, ears skyward, not listening to me, erratic direction, occasionally squealing loudly, an explosive spook or two. As I applied firmer aids and insisted he pay attention and do what he was being asked to do, he would abruptly give 3 or 4 serious rodeo bronc bucks, head down, hairpin back, impressive elevation.
Ironically, the bucking signaled the end of his short distraction period. He would then settle right into work. Unfortunately the bucks would have a warm-up steward move the dials from “keeping an eye out” up to “red alert: ammy on very naughty horse” … just as the drama was about to be over.
He never ran into anyone and I made sure to place him where he wasn’t impeding anyone else’s path. His erratic period never lasted, he would always settle. But it LOOKED bad and sometimes the squealing sounded bad as well. For the first few minutes, that is all the steward knew about us.
Three things helped minimize the drama and avoid the bucks altogether …
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Group lessons, as was mentioned above. Not just a couple of other horses from the same farm, but with a larger group of 5 or 6 including haul-ins that he didn’t know (or we hauled in). Even cross-country schooling with a group was helpful. This was part of the 4-week horse trial preparation, not just for the schooling.
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Start the warm-up by riding as quietly as possible around the outside of the warm-up mob, walking and trotting without fussing with him. Not in the mob, but stick to the long route on the outer edge, with some space between Horse and the other horses. This helped to level out his behavior and avoid hysterics and bucks. Just as important, he was a lot less visible to the steward behind the other horses for most of the circuit! :winkgrin: (See below for alternate strategy if there was no room to ride around the outer rim of the mob.)
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Allocated extra warm-up time for the settle-in period. Didn’t count those minutes toward the serious warm-up. That lifted the pressure on me to put pressure on him to warm-up in a timely fashion, for the first few minutes. With less pressure in the first few minutes, he got over his excitement more smoothly and quickly.
If warm-up was configured so that horses were working on the rail and there wasn’t an ‘outer-rim’ space, we would get in some walking time before entering warm-up. Since many horse trials don’t allow wandering around on your horse, I would ride to warm-up, then follow the trail of riders to another barn/stable area, then back & forth on whatever route was available, once or a few times, at a quiet walk. It didn’t confuse him to ‘return home’ and leave again, or go to and from other horses, because that’s part of my training regimen in any case (or overcome it if he already is). Just being out among the horses helped.
Longeing might or might not help and I usually didn’t do it at the show grounds unless I was sure we could keep it quiet.
Always have thought that part of managing the warm-up drama is training at home on a daily basis to discourage a horse being herd-bound or barn-bound. I was taught long ago that this is an essential part of horse training. These days I’ve often been surprised at how few riders seriously work on this, given the amount of trouble this natural behavior causes. It won’t necessarily cure every serious hard case, but it would minimize or avoid a lot of behavior that riders have to cope with otherwise.
