Training a Horse to Lope

Video Transcript

"We're preparing to lope this horse, but as we've encountered this kind of fussiness, it's a good time to comment about the rider's reaction and what we need to do when a horse gets this jiggy and doesn't want to stand. Again, it's a quiet, quiet rider who's going to try to bring that leg back, relax her leg, and she knows that her horse may have these couple of little bucks. We're going to try to ride through them. We know the horse is relatively safe. This is part of that greenness. This is part of what my rider's encountered with her new horse. And so we try to ride her through those bucks, always maintaining the stability through our seat and our leg that we've come to be good at. So you can see now with the rider's comfort improving, the relaxed leg, the horse is more forward, we've kind of worked her through that buck. Always expecting though, and always being ready, prepared for whatever the horse presents. This rider's capable of managing a horse like this, and she just needs to learn the skills of the trade that say, just let that horse kind of buck it out and hope that it turns into a more forward, less chance of that buck continuing. Then we start to work on the roundness of the circle, try to put a little bit of balance into it. But the overall desire is that we keep this horse very forward. We cannot stress that enough. The more you allow the horse to move forward and work through some of these issues, the better. So this little horse is starting to improve, the rider's starting to feel more confident, and can begin to put the polish or some of the better balance technique into this little workout. We're also working on the halt with this horse, and so we're going to hope that through the use of loping, one of the things I say is if we really lope a horse correctly, if we make this horse work hard while they're loping, they bend, they're on their correct lead, they're working hard, that horse in its mind is going to start to say I can't wait to stop. I can't wait to halt. This horse is going to want the rider to be in a good, solid communication. We're teaching our horses that we drop our hand, sit deep and use a very quiet whoa, and then let them try to bring it to a halt. And so with just a little bit of training in her background, we've seen this horse come a long way in her halting skills. And we're not having to pull back, we're not having to create a big fight over it, it's just repetitive, repetitive. Keep using good skills and watch your young horse come together for you."