The day before a dressage competition, shampoo the horse's mane, body and tail, braid their mane and apply sheen to their tail. Get a horse ready for a show with helpful advice in this video on horse training and dressage.
We're going to talk about show turnout today and how we prepare our horses for the competition dressage ring. Of course, your horse has to be nice and clean. So the day before the show or at the show, you would want to give them a nice shampoo of their mane, their body, their tails. Get them really clean and shiny, and then at the actual competition right before you will have to braid the horse. So whether you are good at braiding or have to learn how to braid, or have someone that will braid for you. I will demonstrate how we braid in the dressage world. There are many different ways to braid. Some people braid with the yarn, which is actually more of a hunter way to braid. But typically the more traditional way is to braid with elastics. So you can either have like a little pouch with you where you have all your supplies together or you can just put things in your pocket. So what you want to do is have a nice comb and you can separate their mane. All along you want to go nice and evenly, I prefer having at least fifteen braids. Some people prefer to do big braids, you know five or six of them, but I think it looks nice when you do a little bit more. Depending on the horse's neck length as well, if you have a horse with a shorter neck, you can sort of play it up and add more braids and you know make it seem as though it's longer. Amicelli has a very nice length neck, so you know I do average about fifteen braids. I have a little spray, which I spray into their mane. Which this helps me, it's called Quick Braid, it helps the mane actually, you know helps everything stick a little bit better and I just separate it into three sections and would braid like you would braid your hair. Nice and tight you know, you don't want it too loose, you don't want a braid coming undone in the middle of your test, and you braid it all the way down. Making sure too, that your horse's mane is a nice length before you braid. You don't want to have it too short that you can't do a nice braid, and you don't want to have it too long either. So sort of an in-between length. Oops. Flies. So then put the elastic in nice and tightly at the end of the braid, and you would go along the neck and do all your braids. What I do is I like to do them all first, section them off and once I'm done, then we flip the braid up into two sections, once like this and then we roll it one more time, but the braid lies, put another elastic, oops, another elastic in, not very good elastics. And, but the braid lies nice and flat and then of course you have the option of adding white tape or not. I am definitely a white tape fan. I think it's flashy and it just adds to the horse. But there is an example of one braid and you would go along and do about fifteen of those braids. And then we also want to make sure that you have the tail nicely conditioned and you can get any kind of show sheen for that. You spray it into the tail, make sure it's nice and manageable, and then you would make sure it's really, you know like it's got a leave in conditioner in there and then you would separate through the tail with your comb and fluff it up nicely that it's gorgeous looking. So that's basically getting a horse ready for a horse show.
