If you teach your horse to reach their front end you’ll save yourself a lot of drama and heartache when it comes to teaching your horse to collect. You can really help a horse learn to follow their front end and shift their weight back with this drill.
Happy Trails and happy riding!
We like our horses to tune into our seat and our body, so we can use the reins and our legs to refine the cues we give them for turnarounds, rollbacks, spins, or gathering up so we can do a canter pirouette (or swap directions quickly to corral an unruly bull come fall). Plus, anyone else can use “whoa” or “ho” and that might mean something to our horse when we don’t need it to.
The last thing any horse really wants to do is fidget. No, seriously, think about it. If you’ve watched them in the pasture, when they’re not eating, they’re lazing, and if they’re young and full of energy, they’ll play for a bit and go back to eating or lazing. They’d rather be at peace than bothered, and to me, a horse that paws is a horse that’s bothered.
Today, I’d like to share with you something that’s been on my mind — Broke vs. Gentle horses. To me a broke horse goes where I want, when I want, at the speed I want. They’re soft in the face, the ribs, and they’re willing. That does not, however make them gentle. Quite a few…
When choosing a horse trainer the options can be endless. With this article, I aim to help you decide what’s important to you, what’s important to your horse, and highlight some things you will want to look for to find a good fit for you. There are a lot of handy horsemen in this world…
Over the course of the next four weeks, I’m going to share with you, the basics of collection. This series will show you where I start, and how I progress. As we delve further into collection, I’ll show you how this relates to the barrel pattern. I need to start by saying this: I believe…
Keep in mind, you only have about 10 minutes of quality time to train at the lope. Due to this, I do most of my softening work at the walk.