How to Squeeze Stop a Walking Horse

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kelli on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to ride your horse with a walk. Squeeze stopping is more advanced stopping technique that is most commonly used riding in the western style. So when you are squeeze stopping, you have your horse go forward. I'm applying, I'm basically sticking my spurs or my heels into the both sides and getting her to stop. So I'm not using any rein pressure at all. I'm not picking up on my reins at all. So this just shows what level of skill has, how well your horse listens to you. It also if you were riding in a show situation, this is much more advanced instead of you having to pull on your horse or jerk back on it. It just shows that your horse is really responsive, really listens to you. Now what this does is takes a great deal of training. You can just hop on your horse and stick your heels in and expect your horse to stop. Which could actually end up being very bad for you if you do that. So you want to get your horse accustomed to this type of technique cause usually a leg for the average horse is consider to be a forward command. So western horses leg is consider more of a lifting command or to move one part of the body or another. So if you want to train your horse to this one way, what you could do is just stick your heels in and you could pull back and say whoa. Eventually they would associate just the spurs digging in with the word whoa. But you cannot expect to just hop on your horse the first time and dig your heels in them and have them stop. You are probably going to end up going for a ride. So you want to make sure that the first time you get on if you are teaching your horse how to do this, you want to apply a little bit of rein pressure. You would pick up and pull back, you want to sit deep in your saddle. Sit back on your seat bones, put your spurs in and say whoa. When you are showing in a show atmosphere this is a really advance technique you don't have to move the horse head or anything like that. It make a really good impression on the judge to show how well your horse is trained. So that is how you would want to go about squeeze stopping your horse. "