Your horse spooks at the plastic bag in the barn aisle…unless it has his treats in it. He doesn’t want to go past a driveway where someone has put out a garbage can. He has suddenly started to avoid going …
Training
The exercise ‘Release to a Jump’ encourages your horse to engage physically and mentally in a free jumping challenge. Even if you don’t plan on jumping your horse, this exercise is a valuable tool that helps with good horsemanship, and …
Lunging is a valuable training tool that every horse person should be able to do well. It’s also something horse people often don’t agree on. There are those who believe that:
- free lunging is a better option than using a
Wrong lead!” The coach calls out and the rider deflates. Fast forward a year down the road to see the same rider initiating the wrong lead…on purpose. Why? She’s discovered the counter canter as an essential tool in building a …
Are you having difficulty developing shoulder control, circles and consistent impulsion? The “Daisy Pattern” is a great exercise to help with these issues because it involves many turns, which encourage the shoulders to do most of the work, creating better …
Leading a large, anxious, excitable flight animal that outweighs you by 800-1,000 pounds can be a nerve rattling situation and it can also become dangerous.
A correct spin is essentially a horse walking his forehand around his haunches – body parts aligned fairly straight and a slight bend.
An exercise I like to use to for improving focus, straightness and rating speed is called Post to Post. Compared to some of the other exercises in this series, it may seem fairly simple. It offers many benefits for both …
Barging behaviour is sometimes about space – whoever owns the space and can move another horse out of that space determines the herd hierarchy.
To shift your horse closer to a gate, along a pole or away from the horse giving off bad vibes beside you in the class line-up, you’ll need to teach him to side pass.
What’s a side pass?
Most equine …
Steve Rother teaches a series of foundation exercises to develop balanced control of your horse’s movement. Keep reading for more information.
When you go to get your horse, what does he usually do? Stoically stand still while you approach him? Ignore you? Look toward you? Look away from you?
Many riders learn the “hows” of riding, but often miss out on the “whys.” It’s a shame, because if we could grasp the logic behind the skills, and their future application, we would be more motivated to master them. In …
Recently, the ‘alpha theory,’ where the human is dominant (‘alpha’) and the horse is submissive, has become the accepted way to establish relationships with horses. While this type of relationship can make the horse easier to work with, it does …
If you have ever watched people attempt to mount their horses, you may be surprised by how difficult this seemingly simple task can be. Often, the rider positions the horse and then scrambles to mount before the horse moves off.…