How to Stop a Horse from a Lope

Video Transcript

"I'm Kelly on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to show you some tips and techniques that I use when cantering and loping my horse. Once you have your horse loping, you're going to want to use some techniques to stop and back your horse. So that we did by sitting deep and pulling up a little bit. You can also use a squeeze stop technique which works when you put both your spurs in your horse and it will cause your horse to shut down. Now this is something that you want to make sure that your horse is trained properly do. You don't want to just get on your horse and jam your spurs in and expect it to stop or you might end up going for a wilder ride then you anticipated. This is a technique a lot of Western riders will use with their show horses, because it's a lot more effective. You can see I'm not having to pull up or jerk on my reins a lot. This just shows a little greater level of skill so it looks a lot prettier to not have me jerking on my horse. Whoa..so once I have her stopped and I ask her to back, now she'll back just by me rolling my spurs in her and picking up a little bit. You can also back just by picking up and applying a little bit of pressure. Now if your horse isn't good a backing, or maybe fights you a little you may find that you'll need to pull a lot harder, but once you get a little bit out of them they took a couple steps just give a couple of pats, say thank you, you did a good job and eventually they will learn what your asking of them. Another thing that you can do if you have a hard time getting your horse to stop is if you say whoa and your horse doesn't stop you can keep pulling until you get your horse to stop and then actually pull your horse until your horse actually starts to back up. Horses like to stop a whole lot better than they like to go backwards so eventually your horse is going to get tired of backing up and he'll just stop when you ask him to stop. So again, kiss, kiss when your in your lope and you want to stop you just sit deep and you can squeeze stop by putting your spurs in on each side, whoa, or you can sit deep and say whoa, but if you notice kiss she has a much cleaner whoa and quicker shut down when I squeeze stop her. So it is something that you can definitely work on with your horse to get your horse to stop a little bit more efficiently."