WHAT DO YOU REALLY MEAN WHEN YOU SAY THAT YOU WANT TO LEARN HOW TO RIDE A HORSE?
The premise of this article is that you really have a genuine desire to want to have a life-long commitment and connection between you and your horse with a deep relationship that has reached a level of partnership that goes beyond what is normally seen in the general population of horses and their riders rather than just having a master-slave one for your self-aggrandizement.
Learning how to ride a horse is not a causal undertaking. It is a life-long endeavor with no end to your journey. It takes dedication and commitment along with sacrifices you must make and difficulties you must overcome along the way. It is also important to recognize that the process of learning how to ride your horse is also intrinsically interwoven with the training of your horse because , in the final analysis, while you are learning to ride you are also the one who is in contact with your horse and so therefore you are also the teacher of your horse. The amount of time it will take to fully develop your horse will depend on several factors. A few of these factors are: your level of skill as a rider, the amount of actual hours your horse is ridden, the environment your horse is ridden in plus the horse’s personality and his speed of learning. Things of quality take time to mature so putting a time-line on your undertaking will be detrimental to your ultimate success. You should find enjoyment in your journey and not get hung up on arriving at a destination.
When you begin your journey it is always best to begin at the beginning. So, first of all, you must know what your personal motivation (doing something for personal joy or internal reward) is to want to do this. In other words, you must answer the question why learning to ride a horse is important to you. The answer to this question will determine the amount of drive, energy, determination, and persistence you will put into your undertaking to accomplish your goal.
Another important question that you need the answer to is what do you want to do with your horse. Do you want to ride in competition, either western or English,? Do you want to do that on the flat or over jumps? Do you want to trail ride? Do you want to ride and work on a ranch and rope and gather cattle? Your choices are almost endless.
In today’s fast-paced world of expecting almost instant gratification for your efforts and quickly attaining a superior level of expertise in whatever you are attempting to accomplish, it will be difficult to slow down and recalibrate your mental and physical velocity when it comes to you learning how to ride your horse as well as also being the person responsible for his training because the horse is not built for any quick and easy way of learning which you may envision using to teach him what you want to teach him. So, if you are serious about your undertaking, you should realize that, in effect, you will be going back to school in a sense because you will be learning about a whole new field of study.
Even before you begin the part of physically interacting with your horse you should learn about the horse before you can start to become his leader. You must learn about how and why he thinks the way that he does, how he feels, how he moves, how he learns, how he expresses himself, how he sees the world from his perspective and why he sees it that way, and how he is conformed and why he is built the way that he is. Remember that you have the responsibility to your horse of doing him no harm and working with, not against, the nature of the horse.
An important aspect of learning to ride and simultaneously training your horse is to understand that he has to be in a frame of mind that is somewhat void of fear because if he has a fearful mind then he is unable to reason and therefore, unable to solve problems. In order for any training to actually work on any horse, the horse must first be able to think his way through what is happening to him while it is happening. He is a prey animal so to him everything is a danger until he recognizes that it is not. You are, by contrast, a predator. So it is understandable that your horse (the prey animal) initially sees you (the predator) as a threat to his well-being until proven otherwise.
The “art” of the process of developing your horse in a way that will engage his mind, not just his physical body, involves you knowing what to do, when to do it, and why you are doing it even though you yourself are also learning. It is also having a clear understanding of what should be accomplished before he is even under saddle. In other words, you should first introduce him to everything you desire him to do by doing groundwork, And this also pertains to ‘restarting’ him if he has gotten off-track in order to be successful. The purpose of doing groundwork is to introduce the horse to the various movements that he will be required to perform in order for him to be a good riding horse without having to worry about carrying the weight and unsteadiness of a mounted rider.
Another thing to remember is to treat your horse as an individual by focusing on what he seems to need at any point in time during the training process. So, in approaching this developmental work, it is best to not get caught up in trying to emulate someone else’s method of training just because they are famous or well-known. Many folks resort to a ‘catchall’ program in an attempt to fix any and all issues their horse may have through the mechanics of various repetitive training techniques. Some of these techniques include the use of flags (sacking out), plastic bags, monotonous lateral flexions (either mounted or on the ground), constant disengagement of the horse’s hind and fore quarters, excessive round-pen work such as chasing the horse around with a lunge whip until he is soaked with sweat – but without him not knowing what you want from him, etc. Sometimes this type of program may be helpful for a few horses, but it is generally doesn’t work in the long run for the majority of horses.
If you become wedded to a certain system, technique, idea, or dogma about how things should be done when learning how to ride or in the training of your horse and then follow it blindly to the exclusion of everything else, you lose the flexibility of thought and action which are the keys to success in the training
of your horse. And it is this inflexibility in thinking that usually gets you in trouble because it creates tunnel vision and tunnel vision seldom allows for the expansion of awareness that will allow you to try things you haven’t tried previously or allows you to think outside the box that you have put yourself into.
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Groundwork, done correctly, can teach your horse the fundamentals of bending, stopping, turning, backing up, going forward, up and down transitions from walk to trot to canter, half-passing and side-passing, and shoulder-in – all without the burden of an unbalanced rider on his back. And one of the first and most important things that you must teach your horse is to follow the feel of the rope so that when leading him you do not have to drag him along (it also helps when you are trailer-loading him). Also, it is very important for you to establish boundaries that your horse cannot transgress at any time unless you direct him to do otherwise. Other aspects of groundwork include having your horse come to you or at least stand still so that you can halter him; having him give you each of his feet willingly so that you can clean out his hooves instead of you having to struggle to lift up his legs; and generally having him be comfortable with you touching him anywhere on his body.
Let’s take a look at one example of how doing groundwork can be beneficial to you. Ideally, when mounting your horse from a mounting block or a fence, a boulder when out on the trail or an incline if you do not have access to a mounting block you would like your horse to stand solidly with equal weight on all four feet and not move until you are securely in the saddle and then move forward when you signal him to do so.
But what actually happens with many folks is the opposite of that. Many folks, after saddling and bridling their horse, lead him to the mounting block by the reins which causes pain in his mouth because the bit has been pulled out of place. Then they don’t take the time to square him up so his weight is distributed over all four feet. Once on the mounting block these folks will then pull the horse’s head to the inside by shortening the inside rein which causes the horse to move his hindquarters to the outside making it difficult for them to put their foot in the stirrup. At this point some will make a ‘leap of faith’ and jump on the horse’s back. Or sometimes the horse will just move away from the block. When this happens these folks will get off the block, circle the horse around and start all over again. And the horse will again perform his act. Eventually, however, the horse will stand still long enough for them to finally mount him.
So let’s take a moment to analyze the situation and come up with a more sequential way to get this done with more lasting effects. How about if you present your horse with some definite signals that he will understand so that he can easily come to the mounting block for you to safely mount him.
The tools that you will need for this exercise are a halter, a twelve to fourteen foot lead rope, a seventy-six inch driving whip (some folks call this a ‘buggy’ whip), a fence and, preferably, an assistant. The reason I recommend that you use a driving whip rather than another piece of equipment is that only the last third of the whip is flexible enough (the first two thirds of the whip is fairly rigid) to create enough energy for you to stimulate your horse on his opposite hip area from where you are standing.
So here is how it goes. You will stand on the rungs (pipes) of the fence at a height that will position you above your horse. Your assistant will bring your horse (both of them will be on the opposite side of the fence from you) close enough to you so that he/she can hand you the lead rope which you will hold in your left hand. Now you will lead your horse forward without pulling on the lead rope and have him stand parallel to you on the other side of the fence. The signal to accomplish this is for you to hold up your right hand with one finger pointing upward and click twice. This signal will be immediately followed by you slapping the seat of your saddle twice if your horse does not make an effort to move forward and place himself parallel to the fence opposite from where you are standing. If your horse attempts to move his hindquarters away from the fence, you will reach over the fence with the driving whip and touch him on his opposite hip as a signal for him to bring his hips over toward the fence and in line with his shoulders. After about four or five good tries from your horse, have your assistant come over and lead your horse away from the fence and walk him around for about three minutes before starting the process again. This is done to give your horse a break and allow him to think about what you are asking him to do and to mentally process the signals associated with it.
If you do this exercise for about twenty minutes over a four or five day period of time you will end up with a horse who will come to you on the mounting block when you climb up on it and raise your hand with one finger pointed upward and click twice. Then you can transfer this to any situation which finds you dismounted and needing to remount by using anything at hand to get the job done.
A precursor to doing this exercise is to have your horse really smooth at standing in his own space which involves you having him make a small half- circle around you when you are standing with your back against a fence and asking him to move around you and end up standing parallel to the fence facing you at the end of your lead rope – in both directions.
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After your groundwork program has been successfully completed, you can then start to think about the never-ending process of establishing a common language with your horse so that you both can benefit from your budding relationship. Riding your horse is, in the final analysis, a very personal way that you and your horse communicate with each other by asking and answering questions without words but through feel.
But, before you can start to teach your horse the silent language of the aids that you will use when on his back to guide and direct him, you must first learn to sit on him in a secure and balanced position by distributing your weight in harmony with his equilibrium. By you acquiring this balanced seat it will enable your horse to give you his best performance.
So let’s take a look at where you should sit in your saddle to have a positive effect when riding your horse. First of all, you should have a saddle that naturally places your seat bones in the area of the fourteenth/fifteenth thoracic vertebrae of your horse (the fourteenth thoracic vertebra is located one to one and a half inches back from where the horse’s withers joins its back and it is the only vertebra that stands straight up when looking at a skeleton of a horse). This location will allow you to influence your horse through activating signals with your seat bones rather than having a seat position that can be influenced by the movement of your horse. This is a big deal.
When you sit in balance so that your skeletal structure is allowed to do its job of fighting gravity, then you are free to use your muscular system, tendons, and ligaments with great elasticity. However, by any unnecessarily leaning forward, backwards, slouching, collapsing to one aide or the other, etc., the responsibility of fighting gravity transfers from your skeletal to your muscular system which causes you to tighten up and forsake your relaxed elasticity. The profile that you should strive to achieve is one where you could draw a vertical line from your ears through your shoulder, hip and heel. That position will put you in the deepest part of your saddle so that you are balanced yet flexible.
Imbalance will also show up if, when you are positioned in the saddle, your legs are too short when your feet are in the stirrups. When you ride on the flat there should be an angle of one hundred-ten degrees at the back of your knees and your feet should rest (not be pushed downwards) in the stirrups with your heels naturally falling slightly lower than your toes (about one-half to one inch lower).
If you have an angle of about ninety degrees at the back of your knees (which is an angle appropriate for jumping) then your stirrups are too short. This causes your knees to not be placed correctly against the saddle and causes your lower legs to constantly create pressure against the horse’s flanks which will eventually cause your horse to become dull to your leg aids. Additionally, your hips will start to tighten up and create a smaller area of contact with your seat bones resulting in you having a loss of balance, to a degree. Finally, this unsteadiness will cause you to use your reins as a third stirrup and grip them with hard hands. Horses that are ridden or handled with rigid hands will very quickly develop defensiveness and hardness in their response to your requests because they will be focused on the pain in their mouth and how to relieve it and not on you.
To eliminate any tendencies you may have to ‘hang on’ to your horse with your hands or legs you must strengthen your core muscles (abdominal muscles, lower back muscles, oblique muscles, etc.) in order to sit on your horse in balance with your hands and legs completely relaxed. But, it is precisely these set of muscles that most people, including athletes, fail to pay attention to when developing their physiques. By taking the time to do this, it will allow you to isolate only those muscles that you want to use to achieve a response from your horse and then put them into action at the correct time and not use other body parts inadvertently that are not required. You do not want to end up constantly using your reins as a hand brake while you continue to step on the gas pedal, so to speak, which can happen if you push more horse into your hands with your legs than you can regulate without using force.
Being relaxed and secure in your position with soft hands is the only way that you will be able to listen to what your horse is saying to you and for you to begin the process of developing softness in your horse. Softness is defined as the inner calm and emotional stability of the horse while lightness is the way your horse responds to your signals. A horse can be light but not be soft, but a horse that is soft will also be light.
Remember that the better you learn to ‘sit your horse’ the better your horse will perform. But I must warn you that it might take years of dedicated work to achieve this goal. Also remember that when things don’t progress as you expect them to, you only have to look in the mirror to see where the source of the problem originates.
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The time has now come for you to learn the intricacies of how to communicate with your horse in such a way as to have him willingly respond with softness, suppleness and understanding to your requests, regardless of the situation or environment in which you both operate.
Just to clarify things before going any further it must be stated that what is presented hereafter may be a foreign concept to those folks who have been exposed to the ‘pull to stop and kick to go’ method of relaying their requests to a horse.
This communication process is called ‘The Language of the Aids” ( I refer to them as ‘signals’ ) and it is both a subtle and silent one. It is about learning how to use your hands, fingers, legs, seat, feet, torso, and head to communicate your desires to your horse. There is no yelling, pulling, hitting, or kicking involved, or at least there should not be, if you take the time to teach your horse correctly.
When you activate your signals, it should be done in a sequential manner. First, is a cue(hint), followed in short order by pressure which your horse should offer a response to, causing you to quickly release the pressure as a reward for him answering your request. This can be capsulized as ‘CPRR’ with the goal of eliminating the ‘P’ from the equation. Your signals should also be administered quickly and smoothly and in the case of the use of your hands or legs your hands should act for only one-half second and your legs should act for only about one second before releasing the pressure.
If you prolong the use of your signals it will eventually lead to your horse ignoring your signals or delaying his response to them. This is not to say that you can’t repeat your signals in a ‘call to order’ manner if there is a delay in your horse responding to them, but you should not get into the habit of applying pressure with whatever part of your body you are using to send a signal to your horse and then just increasing the pressure. If you do this it will just cause your horse to become dull to your signals. Nor should you use your legs in a ‘Ticky-ticky’ manner by repeatedly kicking him with little kicks – again because your horse will get used to this annoyance and just tune you out.
To conclude this section, let me present two examples of how subtle you can be when directing your horse. Let’s first take the occasion of you asking your horse to move forward at a walk once you are settled in the saddle. The most obvious way to do this is to press both of your legs against his flanks and apply pressure or give him a touch along his sides with your heels. But a more subtle way to accomplish this would be for you to inhale a deep breath, sit up straight, slightly look in the direction or location where you would like your horse to walk to and internally exhibit the intent of getting there quickly – and do nothing else. Nine times out of ten your horse will pick up on your vibes and move forward. Wow!
Now, for the second example, let’s suppose that you want your horse to stop from the walk, either at a specific place or just stop his forward movement. The usual way that folks get this done is by pulling on the reins (which causes pain in the horse’s mouth). A more subtle way would be to pick a place where you want your horse to stop and when you are about a horse’s length away from that spot simultaneously exhale loudly and, at the same time, momentarily brace your lower back, quickly close and open your fingers on the reins (NO pulling) and quickly press down in both stirrups with your feet and then
quickly release your pressure. If necessary and only if necessary, straighten out your outside arm and lift up your outside rein quickly and smoothly. If you diligently practice these two ways of subtly communicating with your horse for about, at the most, one week you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you get.
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When you begin your mounted work it is well to remember that it is you who has initiated the training of your horse. So when you assume your leadership role you also assume the authority to do so. But, you must also realize that the ability to exact obedience from your horse does not give you the right to do so. It is the willingness of your horse to obey your requests that confers your right to command.
Another thing to remember is that you must not handle perceived resistances of your horse with force because, in reality, it is probably your lack of presenting a clear picture of what you want your horse to do that has caused your horse to misunderstand what you want. All he is doing is giving you his best guess as to want you want. Any force used or having an emotional outburst exhibited by you toward your horse is doubly destructive: destructive to your horse as well as being destructive to you or whoever is riding your horse. It diminishes both of you as a human being because when your ability to think clearly through a situation is lost both of you will then revert to being a primitive being again with little thought ability. So if, when your horse gets troubled, you handle it with temper tantrums or physical force you will not have to learn any techniques about how to ride; you will just need to shout louder or develop bigger muscles. Remember that when knowledge ends, frustration begins, followed shortly thereafter by force.
In order for you to have a horse that will give you long, healthy service for many years you must first develop a sound foundation in him in his first two years of training and before any specialization is done with him so that all his muscles will be properly developed; he will be supple in all his movements; and, most importantly, he will become emotionally stable. All of which will result in him being both internally and externally balanced.
In the first two years of your horse’s education (or re-education) he must be taught to walk and trot in a genuine circle, not an oval one, i.e., one that is equidistant from a fixed center point in the middle of the circle starting at sixty-six feet and then gradually moving down to thirty-three feet and finally a small circle conforming to the length of his body (about eight to ten feet). This exercise will begin the suppling process so that he will learn to stretch the outside muscles and contract the inside muscles of his body. This will also help you in learning how to realign the different parts of your horse that he will use to avoid doing the work, such as moving his shoulders in or out of the circle, moving his hindquarters in or out of the circle, not stretching the outside of his body to align himself correctly on the circle, etc.
Because most horses are born asymmetrical, meaning that they are less flexible on one side than the other (or become that way from being ridden incorrectly) or have one hip that is higher than the other or have one shoulder more slab-sided than the other, or are short-strided in one of their hind legs etc. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The good news is that most of these faults can be corrected by using specific exercises.
These exercises now have been given names that are used mostly by folks who ride dressage, but, originally, they were just exercises developed to correct a crooked horse or get him to have better balance and be more supple. Some of them are designed to strengthen the horse’s hind leg muscles and get his shoulders more supple such as the shoulder-in and hip-in (called travers) and hip-out (called renvers) movements. Others, such as transitioning from a ‘big’ walk to a ‘little’ walk or trot, help your horse to stretch his topline. While others like the leg-yield, half-pass, and full pass will help the horse to become more supple. Moving the horse’s front end around his back end will strengthen and supple his shoulders while moving the back end around his front end will help develop his hind legs and strengthen his hindquarters. These last two exercises, when combined into one continuous movement, will create more suppleness in him. Backing up in straight lines as well as curved lines will also help your horse in developing his hindquarters.
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There is no such thing as a ‘finished’ horse, just as there is no such thing as you knowing all there is to know about how to ride a horse. Both you and your horse will be continuously evolving until you part ways. As stated at the beginning of this article, just enjoy the journey. That is the essence of riding your horse.