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Tom and Sarah Widdicombe are horse trainers and clincians who have worked with a lot of horses, developing a simple and very reliable approach based on keeping things clear and easily understandable for the horse. Tom is the author of the quite brilliant Be With Your Horse while Sarah wrote The BHS Book Of The Natural Horse which I shall be reviewing shortly. I got a lot from spectating at one of their clinics last year so I was really happy to have a place on this one.
This was a four day clinic with most horse and rider pairs getting two sessions per day, one longer exclusive one in the morning and then having two pairs working at opposite ends of the (sizeable) school in the afternoon, one with Sarah, the other with Tom. We had an interesting mix of baby horses, older more seen-it-all ponies, Zorro and I somewhere in the middle and one very troubled horse, who was only around for the last two days.
To keep things flowing and easy to follow, I will talk about this clinic horse by horse, which will hopefully make it easier to see how everyone progressed over the four days. I'm sorry to say that my camera went flat about half way through so there are fewer pictures from the last couple of days although the ones I have are slightly better cos I borrowed our friend's very classy SLR and stuck my SD card in it. Also, I've tended to choose pictures that I liked as pictures so they're not always terribly informative and don't necessarily follow what I'm talking about...
The themes of the clinic were very much on solid basics, finding softness by working through braces and on helping horses to feel secure by making it easy to understand what you are asking for.
( Onto the horses )
This was a four day clinic with most horse and rider pairs getting two sessions per day, one longer exclusive one in the morning and then having two pairs working at opposite ends of the (sizeable) school in the afternoon, one with Sarah, the other with Tom. We had an interesting mix of baby horses, older more seen-it-all ponies, Zorro and I somewhere in the middle and one very troubled horse, who was only around for the last two days.
To keep things flowing and easy to follow, I will talk about this clinic horse by horse, which will hopefully make it easier to see how everyone progressed over the four days. I'm sorry to say that my camera went flat about half way through so there are fewer pictures from the last couple of days although the ones I have are slightly better cos I borrowed our friend's very classy SLR and stuck my SD card in it. Also, I've tended to choose pictures that I liked as pictures so they're not always terribly informative and don't necessarily follow what I'm talking about...
The themes of the clinic were very much on solid basics, finding softness by working through braces and on helping horses to feel secure by making it easy to understand what you are asking for.
( Onto the horses )