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Training Your Pony for Bending Races
If you only schooled one race, it should be bending. The skills it builds, balance, suppleness, sharp turns and a pony that listens at speed, carry straight over into nearly everything else. Get bending right and the rest of the games come much more easily. This pairs well with our overview of the popular races if you want to see where it fits.
Start slow, and mean it
Every good bending pony was built at walk first. Set up your five poles and weave through them at a walk until the pony bends softly around each one without you hauling on the reins. You are teaching it the shape of the job. Rush this and you will spend months fixing a pony that flattens and runs through the line. There is no prize for being quick in week one.
Build the rhythm at trot
Once the walk is soft, do exactly the same at trot. The pony should flow from one pole to the next, changing bend smoothly, with your weight and leg doing most of the steering. Keep your hands quiet. A common fault is busy hands that confuse the pony, when really the bend should come from your seat and legs guiding it round each pole.
The turn at the top
This is where bending races are won. At the end of the line the pony has to turn tight and come straight back into the poles without a wide loop that wastes ground. Practise the turn on its own, away from the poles, asking for a balanced turn off the hindleg. Then put it together. A tidy top turn will beat a faster pony with a sloppy one nearly every time.
Adding speed
Only when walk and trot are genuinely good do you ask for canter and then a gallop run. Add speed in small steps. The moment the pony starts knocking poles or running flat, drop back a gear and rebuild. Speed should arrive on top of accuracy, never instead of it. A pony that has learned the job slowly will get fast on its own once it understands what you want.
If it goes wrong at speed, the answer is almost always to go slower for a few days, not faster. Patience here saves you a whole season of frustration.
Keep sessions short and happy
Five or six runs is plenty. Bending is intense and a tired or sore pony learns nothing useful, so finish while the pony is still keen and give it plenty of breaks. Mix bending practice into your normal schooling rather than drilling it for an hour. The same care applies on competition day, which we cover in our competition day guide. And remember that a pony that finds the job easy is usually one that suits the work in the first place, which is why choosing the right pony matters so much.