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Developing the Young Horse
 "Working in Hand: Yielding Left"
PALM PARTNERSHIP TRAINING™
By Lynn Palm
In the last article, I gave you the basics for teaching your horse both the turn on the forehand and turn on the haunches. Riders usually think of those two maneuvers together, and that is why I put them together. However, it actually is best to teach yielding before doing turn on the haunches.
For this lesson on yielding, outfit your horse with a properly fitting halter with a longe line attached and leg protection. Attach the longe line on the halter's side ring on the side from which you are leading. Start in a small, enclosed area. Once your horse is solid in this lesson, you will be able to execute it anywhere.
My good friend and Olympic dressage rider Jane Savoie describes yielding as a:
"lateral movement in which the horse's inside front leg and inside hind leg pass, and cross in front of his hind legs. His spine is straight and he is slightly flexed at his poll in the opposite direction from the way he is moving."
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 Practice Makes Perfect. Five Weeks to Flawless Freestyle
by Beth Hall
Your freestyle music is edited, you have a choreographic plan to go with it, and now you think your effort is nearly complete. But before you fill out that show entry form, you need to learn a system for practicing your freestyle which maximizes your scoring potential and helps prevent some unpleasant surprises in competition - struggling to establish gait tempos, getting ahead or behind the music, not knowing where or when to adjust striding, or forgetting your pattern.
For Dressage Online subscribers, my freestyle practice system will be presented in five segments, taking you all the way up to competition day. In this series of articles, you'll learn how to produce a secure and reliable freestyle performance. If you devote ten minutes of your daily ride to freestyle skill practice, you can feel confident of a strong routine.
Week 1: Fine-tune the tempo.
Freestyle begins with tempo. The music in your edited freestyle CD has been adjusted and recorded to your horse's gait tempos, but how good are you at maintaining those tempos as you ride? You can avoid the most common pitfall in freestyle riding - getting ahead or behind the music - simply by establishing and maintaining the gait tempo to which the music is recorded.
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