Disciplines allow you to enter your horse into a discipline and you can enter them into competitions, when viewing a horses' page it's the Trophy looking icon. You will have to go in and manually enter them into the competitions via the check box with a check mark ((click the box and it turns into a check mark)) and at the bottom, you hit enter shows. You could also enter your horse into a Career path, do Halters with them if they are registered to a Breed Registry ((Town --> Breed Registries --> Find your breed --> Join --> Enter horses)) if they are a Purebred or simply allow them to Explore.

Training is done via the Dumbbell looking icon. Training a horse is 5 per once a week. Meaning you are able to train your horse once a week up to 5 times. When doing so, it gives stats in the selected Discipline. For example, most of my horses are Thoroughbreds, each training will give them +20 in Speed, +15 in Power and +10 in Endurance. These numbers are not always the same each training and will be randomized each training click. On the training page, you will select their Discipline from the drop down menu ((some folks can and do put their horse into a second discipline and or career)) and then a second box will pop up and from there is a drop down menu that allows you to train your horse offered by others' training centers. I tend to use my own if I can and if not, I will go with those that has a $1 for their trainings.

Showing, I explained it partially above. Essentially once your horse is good enough, they move up into the rankings and will no longer be in the Foundation level. The rankings go from Foundation all the way up to Universal. Once they graduate from Universal, they will become Tier II and go from Foundation all way up to Universal once more and there is even a Tier III that also follows the same game plan. In the beginning, it takes time to do good with your horses in show.

I saw you have an American Saddlebred and a Shetland Pony, with this game, you CAN in fact breed the two if you so wish and get a crossbreed. Plenty of players do crossbreeding to actually get new breeds into the game, IE the newest one done Appalachian Mountain Horse, other times people create Grades to add color into their lines since Purebred breeding does not naturally allow it.

Breedings, are relatively, done when the Stallion and Mare are both level 50, this gives them a Training Boost of 10 ((Take the Stallion's level, add the Mare's level to get a number, then you divide that by 10 to get a number)) and that gives you an idea on what the boost will be once the foal training is FULLY completed, otherwise it will not gain the full benefit. Breeding better foals will allow them to better in competitions, halters and even careers.

Hope this helps ^^

yes! this helps quite a bit actually. so each day i'll be training my horses, exploring with my horse, exploring on my own, and eventually entering them into competitions, showing them, and breeding them

do i start entering them into competitions as soon as i can or do i wait until they've been trained a bit?

Nope you can enter them right away and if they do well it can be a source of income. But keep an eye on how well they are doing because if they arent making money you can switch to try them in halter or careers. 

I recommend having some career horses anyway as you can enter multiple a day as they run every 30 minutes and cost nothing to enter so they are a great source of income. 

You will be entering your horses every day, training them is only once a week but they take 5 trainings before being done for the week.

okay, thank you so much guys you're awesome :]

You're welcome. 

It is a lot to take in with the game but it takes time to learn it, especially when new ^^

Well you dont HAVE to train all 5 times in one day. You can do 1 a day for 5 days. I usually just do all 5 in one day

ah, yeah, i'm probably going to do 1 a day for 5 days personally.