Facilities

We have huge hilly paddocks, usually with 2-5 horses in each. All our horses are in the open air day and night all year round with the opportunity to shelter from rain and wind.

The colts' paddock - here Hamble, Liberty, Noble and Olympic

Our stable where there are 9 big boxes.

Our tracks are in a hilly country, just like the paddocks. We have the following facilities:

• 500 metres round sand track

• 500 metres gravel/sand track, which especially is used for interval training
  
  

  
  Icing Flame on his way from the gravel/sand track to the round sand track

• 2000 metres sand track in hilly country, of which 700 metres are straight and uphill and mainly used for gallop intervals

Hamble on the 2000 metres sand track

• Forest tracks and steep hills, which are only used for riding

Hamble on his way up one of the hills in the forest

• Treadmill, which is a supplement to our normal training

• Water treadmill with individual programmes for different paces and water heights

• Horse solarium to warm up the horses' muscles before training to prevent muscle injuries
  
• Vibration/massage machine, which is mainly used after training for drying, increasing the blood circulation and relaxing the musculature

Training principles

To ensure that the tendons and joints of our young horses are strong enough for fast work, we always jog our horses for up to one year before we start to drive fast intervals. Anyway, during this period we let the young horses go fast for around 100 metres every 2nd-3rd training to teach them how to run.

When we jog our horses we use all our different tracks to make the training more exciting and varying for them. Still our youngest horses are only trained at the 500 metres round sand track, because the hilly tracks would be too tough for them initially.

When our young horses start their fast work we interval train them at home and at the raceway in Århus, which is our home raceway. When our horses start racing they are normally not trained on a raceway any longer, but only at home.

Most of our horses begin to get gallop intervals instead of trotting intervals when they are about to begin their racing career. We never begin galloping them before, because for many horses it would be hard to seperate galloping from trotting if they are trained in both before they have learned to trot properly.

Hamble and Mette interval training in gallop

It is our impression that the gallop training on sand toughens up many horses, because it is very hard work and they therefore get a rapidly beating pulse, even though it is at a quite low pace. Furthermore it is a great advantage to the horses that they use different muscles and other parts of their tendons and joints than in races, because it makes them less likely to get injured.

However we train the horses as individually as possible, and some of our racing horses are doing excellent when gallop training, while others haven't got any better. Thus some of the horses get trot intervals instead of.

Everything considered, we do our best trying to train our horses to be as durable, strong and healthy as possible.

Feed   

All the horses eat loads of hay during the cold season