Training a Horse to Jog

Video Transcript

"We're going to take this horse to the jog now. And we say anything that works at the walk will work at the jog. And we're going to start to see where this horse doesn't have the consistency, the steadiness, and often times probably not the desire to go forward as much as a horse that has more training. Our job right now is just to pursue and keep the forward movement. If this horse should stop or start to get fussy in any way, it's both heels squeezing, asking that horse to maintain its forward rhythm. We're looking for the horse to relax down into the jog for the rider to stay seated quietly in a relaxed fashion. We don't want to stand hard in our stirrups. We want to stay down, keep our elbows quiet at our side, our hand very quiet, and not worry about whether or not this horse is jogging in a slow fashion, but trying to just keep a consistent steady pace. As we start to achieve that, and it looks like we're heading that way pretty nicely today, we're going to also then ask for a little more bend. Start to put that inside leg pressure on the horse. Make sure that our hands are maintaining both the inside direct, and the outside rein is there to support in case we need to use it to keep the circle size consistent. As we take the horse through the jog, we try to check list it and say okay, when we go to the next step, which is our lope, if we should encounter any difficulty, everything we do here at the jog is going to work at the lope. But it's when we move to the lope that a lot of new riders find that this project gets a little more difficult. So you want to pay attention to how much pressure. We talk about the continuum of pressure. Right now this horse seems pretty flexible, pretty elastic and sensitive, so we want to be sure we don't put too much pressure on, so that when we take it to the lope, it stays very controlled and safe in its nature."