Benefits Of Walking For Horses
In one of the last Iceland Horse newsletter, Jessica Jahiel discussing retraining a rescued horse and she described the positive benefits of walking. This is very interesting and this is very similar Lee Ziegler’s recommendations to do a long time walk for gaited horse to build it up, before preparing for gait. The main arguments in his article are:
If you look deeply into French history of horse training, you can see that eighteenth-century French trainer Lee Ziegler recommend for everybody and made it his habit to train horses at the walk for a year or two or more. During this walk he do not buy special equipment for horse training. As a result, at the point he put horses into trot and canter, they already were very strong, flexible, and well-trained. These results were unbelievably great despite low-impact work. According to Lee Ziegler’s theory during simple walk, horses more physically and mentally relaxed. The risk of any sort of injuries is minimal and horses feeling is very natural and comfortable. Horses do not do any resisting for walking and therefore do not required any enforcement. All appeared problems during this walk training were likely to be minor and fixed easily by trainers with any level of experience. As a result he was prove, that this system of preliminary training worked very well. Unfortunately nowadays not many trainers have enough patience and even time to follow these simple but useful recommendations.
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