Training a Horse to do a Figure 8

Video Transcript

"Our horse and rider are beginning to understand each other. There's a certain calm kind of a peace and harmony that's coming together. We can take them now and get, kind of get out of the box a little bit form those basics. My next step that I like to put a young horse and hopefully an accomplished enough rider is to go into what I call figure eight transition. We do little half circles that then create a small figure eight. It allows the rider to think about how we're bending our horse around our leg. It helps the horse to remain very forward as they learn a little bit more about that increasing pressure release of pressure. The rider gets to sense how sensitive is the horse and it might applying just the right amount of pressure to create those small figure eights that began to make a more flexible and soft sided horse. When this horse goes to cower she's going to need to be extremely soft sided, flexible and balanced through her shoulder and hip. So while we're doing this it's giving the horse a chance to think about how we use our bodes athletically in moving through this pace. If we can get our horse to that point where she is extremely relaxed. Very quiet and enjoying this work then we can take her to include a pivot at the center. So as we work this horse through her figure eight we're going to see if we can do this. She may or may not be quite ready enough because we have found her to be quite high energy today. But, we're going to take that nice bend around our leg and as we bring it to the center our riders going to switch pressure and see if we can this horse to want to just step forward and lightly cross over. Keeping her forehand light her hind quarter engaged as she makes that turn. So right there we get a little bit of a pivot. The horse is starting to settle in and we can start to ask one more time and see whoops a little bit too much excited. If this were my training session with this horse I would take her back a notch and just continue with the quiet soft work. But, we're looking at a horse that we've decided we've encountered some challenge. How do we fix that challenge? How do we bring this back? To where we the rider can start putting together a better partnership."