Horse Riding and Polo Lessons for Beginners
Horse Riding and Polo Lessons for Beginners
Taking Riding lessons from an instructorwith Polo experience and a school of horses rather than hopping aboard yourneighbour's hardly trained 5-year-old nag gives you the twofold benefits of aknowledgeable instructor and a highly experienced and well trained horse with agood temperament that can tolerate added bouncing at times.
The other benefits of learning to ride ahorse are that, it is a great activity for young and old alike, and is alsoexcellent for people with physical, cognitive or emotional disabilities.
A quick crash course into Polo
You don't want to have a bad experience,before you head out into the field you want to make sure that you have controlof your animal.
A lot of the gaining control of your animalwill come through experience and just gaining confidence, and realising thehorse will do what you tell it to do when you tell it to do it. That is if youknow what you're doing, and safety should always come first.
When equipped, each rider has along-handled mallet that they use to try and score a goal by hitting a whitewooden ball into the opposing teams' goal. It is fast, furious and exciting tobehold, especially as the horses seem to come within inches of your sidelinelounge chair.
Polo is an incredibly fun and exhilaratingsport to watch and even more so to play. It is a game played in seven-minuteperiods called chukkas, with six chukkas being the normal length of play. Thereare four riders and their mounts on a team.
The Grounds and Field
On a full sized grass field, each team hasfour people. The Polo grounds are 300 yards long, 160 yards wide if boarded.Being boarded means the field has a 12-inch upright board bounding theperimeter, which stops the ball rolling easily out of play.
If the ground is un-boarded, it is 200yards wide and marked with a white line.
The goal posts, which are poisoned at eachend, are measured to be 8 yards wide.
The duration of Play
A full Polo match is 8 chukkas, but oftenin club matches only 4 or 6 chukkas are played. Each chukka is timed to last 7minutes, then a bell is rung, but the game goes on until the ball goes out ofplay, or for another 30 seconds when the bell is rung again, the chukka endswhere the ball is.
The clock is stopped between the umpireblowing his whistle to stop the play, and the whistle to restart play if a foulis committed or the ball goes out of play.
There are intervals of 3 minutes betweeneach of the chukkas and 5 a minute half time. Ends are changed at every goalscored - this has been found to be fairest when there is a wind.
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