How to Bridle a Horse: Free Horseback Riding Lessons

Video Transcript

" Hi my name is Sarah Stetner. I'm an expert horse rider and I'm doing a video on behalf of Expert Village. In this section I'm going to show you how to bridle up a horse on behalf of getting to ride it. So you are on the left side of the horse, you are on the left side of the horse to do a lot of stuff. To lead, it is the proper side, to mount is the proper side of the left side of the horse, to bridle, to anything is the left side of the horse. This is my horse Rowdy. I'll take his halter off so he doesn't run, and you just want to drop halter over his nose. Go ahead and tie it up here again or rebuckle it. So lets see that he is still tied with the halter right here. Take the bridle. This is called the twisted wire snaffle bit, that is what we are going to put in his mouth. There is hundreds of bits out there. The reason why I'm using a twisted wire snaffle bit is because he is used to it. He is 23 so he doesn't need that severe of a bit to show him how to do it. So what I'm doing here is putting on the head stall, but the nose band over make sure that you have the reins and everything right. I'm riding with split reins. And you are just going to kind of put the bit to his mouth, just to his teeth. And you could either you say open, he is really good about opening up for the bit, but usually when you are right there, I'm going to drop the bit again just to show you. When you are right here you could take your thumb, see how my thumb is right here, and you can slide it inside the horse's corner mouth to get him to open—if he doesn't open you just do that. But, he is pretty trained to open. So we have the horse's bit in his mouth right here, so now what you want to do is put this head band over the ear. We come over here real quick and do it to the other side. Now you just want to adjust it and make sure that the bit and everything is right. Make sure that it is not twisted, which actually it is twisted over on this side over here. If you want to see that I don't know. Anyway you see that it is twisted right here, so I'm just going to drop the bit back out, nice and easy, and untwist this side. You see the rein was up here and the rein is supposed to be twisted back here like that. That is the proper way, which is my fault for not checking. So we are going to ask him to open up again with the bit, just put the nose band up and over, get his ears in there and we adjust the bridle. So I'm going to hold Rowdy, it is okay. Easy. See it kind of pinched him. So that is why he threw back like that. So we just make sure that everything is all good. We could undo the halter now. Since we have control of him right here on his reins and then we tie up the throat latch. You don't want it too tight, you don't want too loose. You want it kind of perfect. Looser is better then tighter. That is how you bridle a horse."