V.C Equine Performance & Partnership

27/02/2026

Pole clinic at hollisters on Sunday morning.

Anyone wanting a space? 😁

Suitable for all ages and abilities 😁

25/02/2026

🐴 Hickldie-Pickldie Poles: Building Better Proprioception & Stability

🎯 Hickldie-pickldie poles challenge the horse’s brain as much as their body.
It should look like you’ve just played a game of Kaplunk in the school — absolutely no structure, no symmetry, no neat lines. The randomness forces the horse to continually assess footing, adjust stride, and think about where every limb is going.

🦵 Great for horses with hypermobility or laxity.
When joints are overly mobile, the body depends on soft-tissue control for stability. Unpredictable pole spacing encourages activation of the intrinsic muscles that support the joints, helping reduce unnecessary movement and improve overall stability.

🧠 Each step over the irregular layout boosts the horse’s awareness of hoof placement, joint angle, and limb trajectory. Over time, this strengthens proprioceptive accuracy — making the horse more balanced, coordinated, and confident on varied terrain.

💪 Strengthens deep stabilising muscles and supportive ligaments.
Hickldie-pickldie poles recruit small stabiliser muscles that straight-line schooling can’t reach. These intrinsic muscles help protect joints, support ligaments, and build healthier movement patterns.

🌿 A simple, affordable training tool with big benefits.
Whether you’re supporting rehab, building strength, or improving symmetry, chaotic pole patterns add functional challenge and real value to your horse’s routine.

If you’d like help designing pole setups for your horse’s specific needs, feel free to reach out. 🐴✨

📍Supporting horses (and riders) across Berkshire, Hampshire & Wiltshire to stay comfortable, balanced, and happy all year round.

23/02/2026

🌺 A gentle reminder as the spring grass starts coming through 🌺

As always do your own research

Please make sure your horse is actually getting enough salt.

A salt lick is not enough to meet their daily requirements.

It’s useful as an enrichment but most horses simply cannot consume enough salt from a block alone. The same is said for a mineral block.

So they end up under supplemented without anyone realising.

Normal intake would be 10g per 100 kg body weight for a healthy horse.

Always make sure your horse has plenty of plain fresh water aswell. Never just give salt water.

Salt helps to encourage more drinking & balances out the high potassium that’s in the Spring grass. And they need salt all year round.

It’s essential for proper muscle and nerve function. Without enough, horses can experience weakness, lethargy, stiffness, muscle spasms, sensitivity, spooky behavior, head flicking.

Some will chew wood, be mouthy on objects like gates, lick your hand excessively, lick the bodies of other horses,

We do have to look at other potential causes of chewing wood etc as it could be stress related, pain, lack of fibre, teething .. this post is predominantly about the importance of salt in the diet.

One of my clients new youngster was very bitey & was chewing wood. So I advised to feed salt straight away. In fact we got some salt to offer him from my hand and he eagerly licked it.

Rachel messaged me letting me know it’s working for him 🙌

22/02/2026

16/02/2026

I have a few spaces left for Sundays pole clinic at hollisters.

Please pm me to book 😁

04/02/2026

🌟Online Bit & Bridle Consultation – Now Live 🌟

After completing a number of successful tester consultations, I’m excited to officially launch my online bit and bridle fitting service.

🏇This service has been created for:

• Owners in rural or remote areas with limited access to professional fitters
• Those working with tight budgets but who still want the best comfort for their horse
• Horses starting their first bit and bridle, or those new to bitting
• Riders who want guidance but don’t have local fitting support

⚠️This is not a replacement for in-person fittings, but it is a practical, accessible option to help improve comfort, welfare, and understanding of correct fit where in-person services aren’t available.

I see far too much poorly fitting tack across social media, and many horses working in discomfort simply because owners don’t have access to the right support. This service exists to change that — even in small ways — by helping more horses be comfortable, relaxed, and correctly equipped.

💷 Online fitting price: £30

My goal is simple:
To make correct fitting more accessible, more affordable, and more achievable — so more horses can work in comfort.

If you’re interested, would like to book, or want more information, just message me 📩

31/01/2026

When sore feet get mistaken for personality 🫣

I have written before about Sensitive Sole Dysregulation Disorder (SSDD), so I will not unpack it again here. What matters is how often sore feet get rebranded as personality traits, temperament flaws, spookiness, “trauma,” or whatever emotional diagnosis happens to be fashionable this week.

Hoof pain is inconveniently subtle. Hooves do not bleed or swell theatrically. When all four feet hurt, as is common with laminitis, thin soles, poor angles, or metabolic stress, horses do not limp in reassuring ways.

There is nowhere comfortable to limp to. Instead, the stride shortens, rhythm unravels, the body tightens, and the horse feels wrong while looking mostly fine.

Because nothing looks dramatic enough, the explanation shifts to behaviour. Suddenly the horse is emotional, reactive, sensitive, or “just like that.” Riders reach for a training fix or a trauma narrative rather than asking a boring but far more useful question about physical comfort.

Years ago, a client told me her gelding was an “adrenaline junkie.” What she was actually describing was a horse who moved better once adrenaline kicked in and fell apart when asked to soften. That is not thrill-seeking. That is pain management.

Adrenaline dulls pain perception just enough to make movement tolerable. Calm states remove that buffer, which is why these horses struggle most when asked to settle.

Sore feet quietly sabotage movement, balance, posture, and behaviour all at once. Then training escalates while the real problem keeps doing its quiet damage.

Not everything is a hoof problem, but sore feet are astonishingly good at disguising themselves as bad behaviour. Before diagnosing personality, check what the horse is standing on.

Collectable Advice 139/365 😎

28/01/2026

“Its not pain he’s had everything checked” 🐴

When people post about issues they’re having with their horse, any mention of it being a physical problem is often met with “he’s definitely not in pain, he’s had everything checked”. More often than not they mean they’ve had his teeth looked at, his saddle looked at and some kind of bodyworker have a look at his back. Perhaps a trot up and bute trial. Unfortunately this doesn't tell us much.

Sometimes people have gone further than this and have dutifully taken their horse to the vet for a proper work-up and nothing of note can be found. The absence of significant lameness does not mean a horse is pain-free. Alarmingly sometimes pathology will be found and it will be deemed “not significant enough” to cause the behaviour, this is so harmful and we absolutely cannot judge how much pain a horse is experiencing from looking at imaging. Sometimes you need to look deeper and find the right vet/professionals to help you do that.

If we pursue something as a purely behavioural issue when there is underlying pain, at best we end up with a miserable, shut down horse performing the task regardless and at worst we end up with an even bigger problem in the long run. We’ll also end up with a horse that has learned humans will ignore his attempts to communicate so he either needs to shout louder, or put up and shut up.

A factor that is even more difficult to navigate is that all professionals aren’t one and the same, so you can end up thinking you have had things checked properly by a relevant professional, and they’ve actually missed something. For example, it is not unusual for me to go out to a client who has tried their best by getting a made to measure saddle fitted and yet the saddle is clearly causing the horse discomfort. It is also not unusual for me to go out to a horse who has been “cleared” by a bodyworker that I find to be sore and uncomfortable. I will always listen to the horse’s opinion above anyone else’s.

Having said all that, there are so many other factors that can be contributing to chronic tension and compensatory movement patterns in our horses that can be causing them to be sore and uncomfortable. Often their living situations are causing chronic high-stress and many training methods cause high-stress and discomfort. My body wouldn’t feel great if I was forced to compress my neck and carry a weight around on my back to the point of fatigue. If we can assess the horse as a whole and improve other areas in their life, we often find we have a much more comfortable horse.

You are ultimately the only one who truly has the power to advocate for your horse. If you feel something is wrong, even if you’ve had “all the checks”, seek out professionals who don’t dismiss your concerns and are willing to help you look a little deeper.

If I had a pound for every horse I’m told has been cleared for pain, who turned out to actually be in pain, I’d have a lot of pounds 🥲.

We oversimplify horses so much, behaviour doesn't fit into two neat little boxes of "pain" or "not pain" This is made all the more difficult by the normalisation of high-stress in horses and the idea that sometimes you have to just "push through". Stress is not a personality trait.

I’d be interested to hear your experiences with being told your horse is fine only to later find out they were in pain. 🐴

24/01/2026

A long day teaching at handford stables today 😁

Thank god for my Equidry 👌🏼🙏🏼

22/01/2026

1 space left in next Saturdays pole clinic 😁

Would there be any interest in an in hand young/green horse session afterwards?

Please let me know if you would like to join 😁