East-West Arena Construction Blog

Proper nutrition is crucial to your horses overall health. The primary necessity in any horse’s diet is roughage, usually in the form of hay or pasture. However, you see horses being fed grains such as pellets, sweet feed and other concentrated mixes. Some horse owners feed bran, beet pulp and supplements.

Looking to build a new arena? Thoughtfulness in the design is the only way to assure you end up with an arena that is enjoyable to use, safe for the horses, and holds up over time. These steps are just as important for a private arena as for a public facility. Here are the best practices in equestrian arena design. 

So you've just had a new arena installed, and as the hours of daylight ebb away you realize that yes, some lights would be nice. The cheapest, easiest solution for an outdoor arena is to mount a few directional floodlights on poles around the arena. This solution should provide sufficient lighting to allow some light flat riding to occur after dark. 

Many people may be somewhat familiar with the term 'Equestrian', but perhaps not so many people are aware that the sport is indeed one with historical lineage.

Most casual sports fans may be aware of (and perhaps, only aware of) Equestrian due to its presence in the Summer Olympic Games. Indeed, Equestrian in the Olympics has been around a very long time, having first been introduced as an Olympic event in 1900. All 3 Olympic disciplines currently seen today were introduced in the Olympic games by 1912.

In August 2014 the Oregon State Fairgrounds cancelled the 4-H equestrian and equestrian game events at Oregon's annual fair. Participants who had qualified for the State competition had already traveled to the Fairgrounds at considerable expense and were quite upset at the last-minute cancellation. The events were cancelled entirely due to the poor condition of the footing in the arena. 

A horse arena requires tons of base and top material. These heavy materials cost a lot to move around, and therefore it is not economical to ship these kinds of materials any distance at all. Therefore when building a horse arena, the local materials need to be used. Each locality has materials available that are different in their properties. An expert arena-builder needs to examine the locally available materials and make decisions about which ones to use and how to adjust the rest of the structure to adapt to the unique properties of the local materials. 

Hunt seat riding or hunt seat equitation is an English equestrian sport. Like dressage, it’s a type of forward seat riding. While folks ride hunt seat for pleasure—it’s very popular with horseback riding enthusiasts—hunt seat is best known as a show event. Within the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA), as an example, hunt seat equestrians are judged over fences and on the flat.

Therapeutic Riding Centers exist because of the horse. Not just any horse, but the retired horse still willing to give to their new type of riders with special needs. These horses come already in their late 20's with leg and foot injuries or disease but have a lot of fight left. We should kiss the ground they walk on some programs actually do-by using high quality footing material in their arenas.

You've probably heard about GGT footing, maybe even ridden on it. It's used in many of the top equestrian facilities in the world, such as the Kentucky Horse Park and the Devon Show Grounds. The GGT stands for German Geo Textile, the name of the company that manufactures the footing additive.