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Experts say the benefits of horseback riding include the obvious, of enjoyment as well as developing better balance, coordination and the exercising of your brain. There are benefits also of Polo as a sport in respect of team building and character building.

Taking Riding lessons from an instructor with Polo experience and a school of horses rather than hopping aboard your neighbour's hardly trained 5-year-old nag gives you the twofold benefits of a knowledgeable instructor and a highly experienced and well trained horse with a good temperament that can tolerate added bouncing at times.

The other benefits of learning to ride a horse are that, it is a great activity for young and old alike, and is also excellent 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 control of your animal.

A lot of the gaining control of your animal will come through experience and just gaining confidence, and realising the horse will do what you tell it to do when you tell it to do it. That is if you know what you're doing, and safety should always come first.

When equipped, each rider has a long-handled mallet that they use to try and score a goal by hitting a white wooden ball into the opposing teams' goal. It is fast, furious and exciting to behold, especially as the horses seem to come within inches of your sideline lounge chair.

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

The Grounds and Field

On a full sized grass field, each team has four 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 the perimeter, which stops the ball rolling easily out of play.

If the ground is un-boarded, it is 200 yards wide and marked with a white line.

The goal posts, which are poisoned at each end, are measured to be 8 yards wide.

The duration of Play

A full 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 a bell is rung, but the game goes on until the ball goes out of play, or for another 30 seconds when the bell is rung again, the chukka ends where the ball is.

The clock is stopped between the umpire blowing his whistle to stop the play, and the whistle to restart play if a foul is committed or the ball goes out of play.

There are intervals of 3 minutes between each of the chukkas and 5 a minute half time. Ends are changed at every goal scored - this has been found to be fairest when there is a wind.