Looking for some new ideas. What are some of your favorite pole/cavaletti exercises for a green horse?
Depends how green…
However, I’m a big fan of six trot poles (in a row) set off the rail. You can do so much with them. In the beginning, working on tempo and regularity and maintaining impulsion over the poles (and trying to keep that impulsion going, around the ring) at the trot… And when they are stronger, I like doing trot poles, to a canter for half of the circle, back to trot.
Another favorite of mine, is two trot poles in a row, placed on the quarter line. Leg yield off the wall to them, go over them, and then leg yield onto the wall to the next set of poles.
There’s really no end to what you can do. Even having one or two placed around is a good place to start.
Cavalettis I do not do as often, but if I do, I prefer to do them at the canter vs trot or walk only because I think it requires more elasticity on their end to do well. A good cavaletti exercise I like for my green horse is to place single cavalettis on a working 3 loop serpentine track. Practice cantering in a circle around a single cavaletti first, and then once they are confident with that, graduate to doing a 2 or 3 loop serpentine…
Poles are used daily in my riding ring. However, I have most poles set as walk-poles. I find just walking over raised poles is an excellent “mental break” and warmup/cooldown for horses of all levels. I usually do 6-8 in a row to really get them pushing from behind and working over their back.
Thank you for this! Stupid question…how far apart do you space walk poles? Is it like 2 - 2.5 feet?
Depends on the stride of the horse. A general rule of thumb is one large human stride (~30 inches), give or take. Walk your horse over them, and then adjust as needed. I would set them about 2.5 feet apart and adjust as needed: if they fit an extra step in, adjust 6" inches shorter, and vice versa.
For cavaletti distances, you’ll find you have to shorten the distance between sets the higher the pole is raised.
Ingrid Klimke remastered her father’s book…it’s pretty wonderful. There are countless YouTube videos of her working various horses with them. Take a look 
I found this one the other day on YouTube and tried it, really great exercise as you can change it to your specific horse. For my higher level event horse we worked it to end in several one strides with a big oxer to finish, and on my grean mare I took out some of the placing poles so she did a pole, one stride no pole, to a x rail, repeat twice. My dressage horse who is a bit more schooled over fences, did one stride x rails with the placing poles, then 2 strides, then another one stride.
It works great to start just cantering through both directions and then you can build from there as your horse is ready. Its one I will keep in my book to use again and again.
