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Boost your horse’s suppleness and manoeuvrability using five poles on the ground

Martha Terry Martha Terry

    • This polework exercise is a five-pole set-up designed to improve your horse’s suppleness and manoeuvrability in trot. Here, they are used as focus points to structure your training exercise, rather than stepping over.

    Aims

    • to improve rider accuracy
    • to confirm correct use of inside and outside leg
    • to improve the horse’s coordination and suppleness

    The setup

    You need: five poles

    Setup: place five poles on a straight line with five metres between each. Then pull the second and fourth poles to one side but keeping them in the same plane.

    Ensure there is sufficient space to the side of each pole so that you can walk around the ends – don’t place them along the fence line.

    Diagram showing the placement of five offset poles and how to loop around them

    The poles help to keep your focus as you work on your horse’s correct bend

    How to ride the exercise

    1. Once warmed up, establish an active trot.
    2. The aim is not to trot over the poles, but around them, ensuring a uniform bend on both sides.
    3. Start with the first pole in the line of three poles and ride a pear-drop shaped loop around that, ensuring the horse is bending through his whole body. Then change the bend in an offset figure of eight to perform another pear-drop shaped loop around the first of the line of two poles.
    4. Repeat with the next two poles in the sequence.
    5. When it comes to the final pole, make a wider loop and come up the middle of the two lines in a mini slalom. Instead of big wide loops with lots of bend, it’s now about creating a little bit of bend in the ribcage. The horse needs to be listening to the rider and have quick reactions.

    The challenge is to do it efficiently with the horse going at the correct tempo and creating the correct shapes, neither falling in or out through the shoulder and quarters.

    Tips

    1. Start slow

    If this exercise is too demanding in trot, try it first in walk (or try this exercise) until the horse understands your aids and what you are asking of him.

    2. Perfection by polework

    Polework is a great way for riders to monitor whether they are achieving something when riding on their own, because they require accuracy. If you aren’t accurate, you will miss or hit the poles. When you’re just riding around the arena without physical markers, it’s harder to judge your accuracy.

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    Martha Terry
    Martha Terry

    H&H features editor
    Martha is an experienced journalist who is mad-keen on horses and dogs. Her reporting CV includes the Paris Olympics, European championships, Aachen World Equestrian Festival and World Cup finals. After growing up with assorted liver and white springer spaniels, she enjoyed 14 years with two rescue dogs. Now, her constant companion is Fidget, an extremely energetic and habitually muddy black and white springer. Martha has written on topics as diverse as a top horse’s clone to the best GPS trackers for dogs, as well as equestrian and rural matters for Country Life, The Field, The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph alongside Horse & Hound.
    Martha Terry

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