This hourglass polework exercise only requires four poles, but provides multiple options to improve your horse’s straightness, suppleness, transitions and adjustability.
Sometimes in a training session, you want to work on a variety of things to benefit your horse, rather than focusing on a specific issue – and this polework exercise does just that.
Aims
Improve balance and straightness
Develop suppleness and rideability
Hone accuracy
The setup
(Image credit: Future)
Place two poles on the quarter lines between H and M, at a 45º angle as shown in the diagram. Do the same between K and F.
It doesn’t matter if they are not precisely placed – they represent focal points rather than exact markers.
How to ride the hourglass exercise
There are many different lines you can ride in this hourglass exercise and you can do all the patterns in walk, trot, or canter, which all have different demands.
First try the loops, incorporating the poles as you leave and return to the track. You can vary the depth of the loop as you fine-tune your aids. A bigger, sharper loop – as far as X – requires more bend and balance, while a gentle curve is easier for a horse to maintain its rhythm.
You can go from loop to loop on the same rein, or turn directly up the centre line after finishing a loop to change the rein, and repeat on the other side. This works on both bending and straightness and helps stop your horse anticipating.
Elongated figure of eight: rather than a classic figure of eight made up of 20m circles, the poles dictate that you ride into the corners before making a straight line across the diagonal to change the rein. This works on accuracy into the corners, balance on the turns, straightness across the diagonal and maintaining rhythm through the change of rein.
Within this figure of eight, you can practise transitions on the diagonal line, for example, halt at X, trot-to-walk and so on.
If doing the exercise in canter, you can do simple lead changes through trot over X, or more advanced partnerships can execute flying changes.
If your horse is losing balance on the turns, falling out through the shoulder or swinging the quarters, take it back a step. Don’t get hung up on completing the pattern.
You can break up the patterns so you do segments, such as one loop then go large. Or go through the lines in walk first, so that he understands the challenge at a slower pace.
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Raise the poles or add cavaletti to add to the challenge.
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.
