Horseback Riding and Polo Lessons for newbies

Taking Riding lessons from an instructor with Polo experience as well as a school of horses as opposed to hopping aboard your neighbour's hardly trained 5-year-old nag provides you with the twofold benefits of an experienced instructor along with a highly experienced and properly trained horse with a great temperament which can tolerate added bouncing at times.

The other benefits of learning how to ride a horse are that, this can be a great activity for old and young alike, and is particularly excellent for people who have physical, cognitive or emotional disabilities.

A quick crash course into Polo

You don't want to have a terrible experience, before you decide to head out in to the field you desire to ensure that you possess command over your animal.

The vast majority of gaining power over your animal may come through experience and just gaining confidence, and realising the horse is going to do what you tell it to do after you tell it to get it done. That is definitely knowing what you're doing, and safety would be wise to come first.

When equipped, each rider provides a long-handled mallet that they can use to try to score a target by hitting a white wooden ball in the opposing teams' goal. It is fast, furious and exciting to behold, especially when the horses manage to come within inches of the sideline lounge chair.

Polo is definitely an incredibly fun and exhilarating sport to observe and a lot more so to play. It really is a game played in seven-minute periods called chukkas, with six chukkas being the conventional length of play. There are four riders and their mounts on a team.

The Grounds and Field

With a full sized grass field, each team has four people. The Edinburgh polo grounds are 300 yards long, 160 yards wide if boarded. Being boarded means the field carries a 12-inch upright board bounding the perimeter, which stops the ball rolling easily from play.

If your ground is un-boarded, it is actually 200 yards wide and marked which has a white line.

The aim posts, which are poisoned each and every end, are measured to generally be 8 yards wide.

The time of Play

A complete Polo match is 8 chukkas, but often in club matches only 4 or 6 chukkas are played. Each chukka is timed to last 7 minutes, then the bell is rung, however the game keeps going before the ball is out of play, or for another thirty seconds when the bell is rung again, the chukka ends where ball is.

The clock is stopped between umpire blowing his whistle to avoid the play, plus the whistle to restart play if a foul is committed or perhaps the ball quickly scans the blogosphere of play.

There are actually intervals of 3 minutes between every one of the chukkas and 5 a minute half time. Ends are changed at every goal scored - this has been discovered to get fairest if you have a wind.