An excerpt from Yoga for Riders: Principles and Postures to Improve Your Horsemanship by Cathy Woods.

When going for a walk or jog, some of us innately feel what gait, swing, and motion is optimal. If we’re paying attention, we know what feels smooth and uses the least amount of energy yet works our muscles in a safe, effective way.

However, others of us have not learned proper alignment, or we have developed bad habits around our posture and movement. The physical aspect of yoga is a practice that helps us improve in these areas so we move better, become less sore, and avoid injury.

Yoga also means spending integrated (and preferably uninterrupted) time with yourself, for the purpose of refining your body and mind. The yoga mat and meditation cushion are ideal places to come to know yourself better—a place for personal "groundwork" and "collection," so to speak.

After I’ve spent time on the mat doing yoga postures, I am more keenly aware of my body. My muscles feel engaged, and I’m more cognizant of how to properly use them. The residual effects linger throughout the day.

This translates into a more efficient use of my body during all my other activities—for example, when lifting a hay bale, I engage my legs more to keep strain off my back, and I am careful to grasp and lift the bale evenly, so I don’t risk straining a shoulder.

Read more: Training the Equestrian Body and Mind with Yoga

by Nikki Alvin-Smith

The bountiful benefits of the sun’s rays bring joy to the hearts of horses and humans, especially for the winter weary residents of colder climes.

But the sun is not good for everyone. Staying sheltered out of the heat and burning beams can be especially important for creatures great and small, especially the young, the elderly, the fair-skinned and the cancer prone. Here are some shade ideas that offer an economic method to address the issue of too much sun.

Give A Horse A Choice

The shade of the spreading chestnut tree may work in poetry for Longfellow (actually it was rather appropriately a horse chestnut tree that shaded the smithy), but it’s not so brilliant as a shelter for horses in an large open field. Even if we forget the risk of lightning strike during a storm, the presence of large trees within a pasture that are neither harmful to horses due to possible ingestion of their toxic fruit, seeds, leaves, or bark are few and far between.

A hedge provides almost no benefit at all in regard to avoidance of the sun’s rays, save for a limited time of possible shade provision early morning or at sunset, neither time being particularly helpful as these times are certainly not the hottest part of the day.

The sun climbs high in the sky during summer months, and avoiding its harsh focus is impossible without a roof under which to hunker down.

For the horse, walking freely out of the paddock directly into a cool horse stall through a Dutch door is heaven indeed. Not only does the sun disappear from view, the incessant buzzing and biting insects usually halt at the doorway and ‘buzz off.’ A double win.

Read more: Here Comes The Sun ~ But It’s Not Good For Everyone