ONLY 3 PLACES LEFT!!

Would you like to have a weekend of good food and a great time with your horse and nothing to worry about except giving your horse a groom and a feed and finding a good spot to watch the sun go down with a glass of wine in your hand?
Join us in March for the Labour Day weekend.
You can bring your own horse or you can call one of our horses your own for the three days.

Have a look at some of the pictures of our christmas riding camp on Facebook

Saturday the 10th of March 2012 we start at 9.30 (you can arrive on Friday afternoon if you don’t like an early start) till Monday the 12th of March 2012 when we will pack up after 4pm and you can make your way back home.

Total of 6 places BUT ONLY 3 PLACES LEFT!!

Tuesday the 24th full day pony day, 9am till 4pm. Only 3 school ponies left, own ponies/horses welcome. Ring Amber on 0419785064 to book. Or amber@yggdrasil.com.au 100,-per rider morning and afternoon tea and healthy lunch provided.

The Pony Day is now booked full. See you all on Tuesday. Weather forecast looks like you will need to bring a waterbottle and a hat!

Happy new year to all!

Just a reminder that prices have gone up on the 1st of January 2012. Lessons will not be cancelled any longer for wet weather, theory sessions may replace riding sessions on very bad days. The only time lessons will be rescheduled is for days of total fire ban as posted by the CFA. On those days lessons can be rescheduled to early morning or evening or a different day in mutual agreement.

Time goes too quick when you are having fun! Today was the last day of the riding camp. I think I can safely say everyone had a ball although there were some stiff and sore muscles! Today Milton from Top Hat Video Productions in Kyneton was kind enough to film our last dressage lessons so each rider can review their lesson at home. We were very lucky with the weather, it was only today that it was getting a bit hot for riding. We did groundwork and clickertraining on Tuesday afternoon. We clicker-trained the horses to kick a big ball in preparation for teaching them to play horse-soccer. Wednesday we rode dressage in the morning and after lunch we had an Alexander Technique session first unmounted and later mounted. Thursday started with a dressage lesson again, at lunchtime Sue and Chris from Good2gr8 Coaching gave a presentation about believes and how you can change your believes to improve your riding. Judging by how much people talked about that session and about changing their believes it was a very big hit. Nice to see so much discussion coming out of such a session! In the afternoon four of our group chose to ride a jumping lesson and the other two opted for another clicker-training session. We had all the scary things in the front garden, umbrella, tarps, pool noodles and the big horse-soccer-ball. By the end we had four horses walking over flapping tarps and targetting the umbrella. (some of the jumping group had decided they’d also join the clicker group by this time as it was a lot of fun!)

But I have not even mentioned the food yet!! Jean outdid herself with fabulous dishes from Frankie Dettori’s cookbook! Great lunches and three or more fantastic courses at dinner time made sure she was the most popular person around amongst the humans but the horses were not so happy with our ever increasing weight I’m sure!

Can’t wait till March the 10th 11th and 12th when we have a long weekend riding camp.

Pictures on the Yggdrasil Facebook page.

I’m very excited, Sue from Good2Gr8 coaching has confirmed she is able to do a lunchtime session at the camp! The session will be on Thursday the 29th of December and is called Beliefs – transform your riding by transforming your thinking. I have had very good experiences and results from being coached by Sue and am looking forward to hearing her and Chris present!

The camp is now fully booked, look for dates for 2012 soon!

Today Shellite came to live with us, she is a 4 year old ex racehorse.

She has had two starts but had an accident in the stable and has a blind left eye as a consequence. Her last race was in January this year at Hanging Rock  and since then she has not done much.

She was very well behaved when we walked her from two properties up the road down to Rose Hill, she was not very bothered by the trafic or anything like that. She had a little while in a yard and then we did a bit of basic groundwork and tried a saddle on her and she took it all in her stride. It looks like Andy’s saddle fits her like a glove and since Andy has been retired and enjoys being a paddock mate for a friends mare in Newham she can take his saddle over!

Tomorrow a little bit more work and a visit from the vet to have a look at her eye to find out if it is fully blind or only partially blind.

I’m sure you’ll hear more about her in the near future!

Cleo waited till I was back from overseas to give us a wonderful new colt “Kilroe Cadel”
We were just thinking we would have to send her to the clinic as she was so long overdue (Due date 20 October) and then yesterday afternoon at about 3pm she started to show signs of going into labour. Looking at her belly, swishing her tail, doing power-walk around the paddock etc. But she would go quiet for a while and then start again. Jean had already cracked the champagne but it took a whole lot longer and at 4am this morning the foal alarm went off and when Jean got outside the foals nose and front feet were out already! He is a very friendly foal that comes up for a scratch and follows you around the paddock.
It will be interesting to see what will happen with his colour, he is sort of dark chestnut now, almost liver chestnut but he could very well go grey. But, whatever his colour will be, he is a very happy friendly healthy guy and we are very glad for that!

Find Yggdrasil on Facebook to see all the pictures of the new arrival!

Please be advised that Yggdrasil Equestrian Training will be closed for 3 weeks from the 17th of October to the 7th of November 2011.

I will monitor my email daily but will probably not be able to access my phone messages.

I will be going to The Netherlands to attend the International Society of Equitation Science(ISES) Conference and the Global Dressage Forum that will be held at Academy Bartels the stables of Tineke Bartels one of the Dutch top riders and Olympic medal winners.

The ISES conference in Sydney two years ago was really worthwhile and I came back full of things to think about and new ideas and I’m very much looking forward to this years conference. At the Global dressage forum this year there will be a demonstration of something that is very close to my heart! I have always had a problem with the fact that you have to ride with a bit and the higher level dressage you ride the more metal you have to have in the horses mouth. You can not compete bitless and you can not ride above a certain level in a snaffel bridle but have to have a “double bridle” with two bits in the horses mouth. This year a French Grand Prix rider will ride a demonstration on her Grand Prix stallion just in a headcollar!

Here a copy of the article that can be found on www.globaldressageforum.com

Bridleless Grand Prix: why not?

A discussion on the use of different bits in the top of dressage will be on the agenda of the upcoming Global Dressage Forum (30-31 October, Hooge Mierde, Netherlands).  A recent quote by Richard Davison: “Why can we compete in the UK at GP level in snaffle and at FEI level just in a double bridle? If governing bodies don’t like tight nosebands then they have to supply alternatives. French Grand Prix rider Alizee Froment will go one step further. During the Global Forum she will ride her Grand Prix horse bridleless.

Alizee Froment is  the French pony Chef d’Equipe and a young Grand Prix rider who competes at CDI level. Riding dressage horses is her profession. Alizee: “No sooner dismounted from one horse than I am up on the next. It is the daily routine of all  professional riders”. Sometimes it is essential to break that routine, says Alizee. “It is the reason why one day, when  my Grand Prix horse Mistral was saddled and waiting for me,  I decided to leave the bridle aside and just puts his head-collar on. I needed to check that Mistral and I were still one. From the first tentative steps, I once more felt pleasure with blood running  through my veins, found a taste of freedom and the immense confidence I  had in him.  More than anything, what came out was an optimal concentration between us, each on the other. In my eyes, dressage is the way toward perfect understanding and absolute harmony and working in the head-collar is a further step along this path. This is why I decided to work all my horses regularly in this way from my 5-year olds to my two Grand Prix horses “.

Alizee Froment will demonstrate her bridleless riding at the Global Dressage Forum and discuss with trainers, judges and an audience of international dressage experts from over 25 countries some of the following questions. Is bridles riding compatible with “classical” dressage? What about the technical riding details, how does one work like this, and how often, and how does it combine with usual double-bridle riding?  And finally, to be discussed with the FEI representatives: to what extent should the rules of competitive dressage adapt?

Dooble Bolt came to us as a broken down ex-racehorse, he was only 3 years old at the time. He will be 5 years old in December and has had all this time off with various problems. If there is anything going around, Doobie will get it. Rain scald, hyves, swolen legs, wither sores and more but he seems to finally have turned a corner and is looking better than we have ever known him. He is slowly coming into work again and so far seems to be standing up to the work. He is the nicest, quietest ex-racehorse you can imagen. You can hop on him and take him for a walk in the garden and be perfectly safe. He just does not know the first thing about balance rhythm or line so that is what he has started to learn. He has a groundwork and lunging sesion about three times a week and a light ride about three times a week as well. Tuesday was his first “riding school lesson” with one of Yggdrasil’s advanced riders we worked in a lesson on teaching Doobie about balance on big circles and in loops off the track. He was such a good boy and I was so delighted to see him work I even forgot to take a picture so here a picture of after his session being groomed down and prepared to be put back in his paddock. He looks like he enjoyed himself as well.