Longeing can be useful both for rehabilitation and as part of a horse's regular training. | Photo: iStock

This common exercise modality can be surprisingly risky; learn how to keep your horse—and yourself—safe

Asked by a nonhorsey friend to explain what longeing is, you’d probably say something like, “It’s when you put a horse on the end of a long line and let him go around you in circles.”

Simple enough. But longeing is not a simple activity.  

For starters, it involves managing that long line and usually a long whip as well. (Tangles, anyone?) And at the end of that long line is … well, let’s just say that a lot of people longe when they don’t feel safe enough to put a foot in the stirrup. Combine one horse that “needs to get the bucks out” with lots of revolutions on a smallish circle on perhaps questionable footing and at perhaps questionable velocity, and you have a recipe for injury—to handler as well as horse