HOW TO STEER A HORSE (Tips for Success ) 🐴

Today I want to talk to you about some basic techniques to help you improve your steering with your horse. Whether you're a beginner rider, you're just getting started riding your horse and you're looking for how to improve your steering, or you're an experienced rider and you want some guidelines to help you improve your technique, then this video is for you. I'm going to take Legend out into the ring and we're going to get started. So when we're talking about correct alignment, we're looking for ear, shoulder, hip, and heel alignment, and we're looking for a slight bend in our elbow which allows our shoulder blade to stay down, and this keeps us stacked over our hips. Now that we have a basic understanding of what correct alignment looks like, let's look at a couple examples of a rider that's out of alignment and how this is influencing the horse and the balance of the rider. In this first example, you can see that I'm leaning forward and looking down, and you can see how this is causing Legend to have to take the turn too wide to compensate for my lack of balance. It's also putting me in a position where if he were to spook for any reason, I would easily fall off over his shoulder. In the second example, I'm exaggerating pulling back on the rein. This is making it more difficult for Legend to use his head to balance. It's also putting me in a position where I could easily fall off as I'm tipped forward. My second tip on how to steer your horse is remembering your flow of energy. So where does our flow of energy come from when we ride, and how is it influencing us when we go to turn our horse or to steer them? Our horses are always the flow of energy is coming from the hind leg up through the core out to the shoulders. So for us, that means we're riding from our seat through our legs and then out to our reins, and that energy flow looks like this. It comes up from our legs into our core and out to our hands and reflects the horse's flow of energy from his hind leg through his core out to his forehand. When we're riding in a correct balance, thinking about this flow of energy, we're going to be more likely to sit in the saddle and really sit on our seat bones. We're going to be more likely to use our seat, our legs, and then our reins as opposed to using our reins first. My third tip is practicing looking ahead, and this may seem like common sense. We want to look where we're going, but if you're a rider, you know how extremely difficult it is to look ahead and how many times we all catch ourselves looking down, and I myself have, you know, struggled with this as a professional rider wanting to look down, and why do we look down? Why do we want to look at our horse when we're riding? And the reason that I feel we want to look at our horse when we're riding is because we're thinking about him. We're thinking about using our body to communicate, and we're thinking, what is my leg doing? What's my hand doing? What is my horse doing? How is he responding to me? And because we're, you know, kind of subconsciously thinking about our horse, our eyes naturally gravitate to him. So something that I work on to help me with this is picking a point ahead and looking at it and feeling what my legs or my seat are doing to influence my horse. So for instance, if I was turning left, I think, how can I, can I feel my right seat bone? Can I feel my right leg? You know, how much am I using it? And I look ahead while thinking about my feeling, and this helps me to start developing this habit of focusing out where I'm going, which is going to allow my horse to balance better, and it's also going to keep me in a place where I'm more aware of what's going on in the arena around me and more able to ride in a way that's safe and that is productive for both my horse and myself. My fourth tip is using your weight correctly. We've all seen that horse and rider that look perfectly in harmony together when they ride, and it looks like the rider's doing nothing and the horse is performing. The reason that that's possible is because that rider is using their weight aid to help influence the horse. And what do I mean by this? I mean they're using where they're placing their seat bones and how they're adjusting their weight to influence and cue the horse to do different movements. Your core helps you to be able to connect to your seat bones. So this is very important when we think about using our weight aid. If I'm using too much leg, so I'm squeezing in with my legs here too much, it's going to push me out of the saddle. I'm going to have less contact with my seat bones. If I'm using too much rein, I'm going to tip forward and that's going to cause me to come out of my seat bones. So how do I use my weight? You know, we don't want to be using our weight in this dramatic way where we're leaning. We want to be using it in a place where we're sitting in alignment and we're engaging from our core on the side we want to influence. So for me, this looks like if I want to move my horse off of my left seat bone to the right, I would engage my leg of course too, but I engage my core here down into that seat bone so that this seat bone is more in contact than this seat bone is. And if I wanted to turn him this way towards you guys, I would engage my right side of my core a little bit, which allows my right seat bone to drop and my hip flexor here to open up and allows me to use my right leg in a way that's relaxed and against my horse. So when you're using your weight aid correctly, you're engaging your core a little bit, which is keeping you down in the saddle and keeping you centered in the saddle as you adjust from right or left seat bone. So now let's put these four tips together and steering our horse correctly. So first I'm thinking about my correct alignment, ear, shoulder, hip, heel alignment. I've got my reins on either side of my mane and I'm going to think about my flow of energy that's coming up from those hind legs through my core out to my horse's ears and I'm going to go ahead and walk down here and we're going to make a turn. So I'm walking him forward. I'm looking ahead to my point. As I go to make my turn, I'm going to engage my right seat bone and my right leg and then look up ahead at my next point and then we're going to turn Legend around here. I'm just going to go the other way. So when I turn him here, I'm going to look towards my next point, engage my left core, ride him forward and again I'm looking ahead. Left leg is going to close, left core engages, opening my right hand a little bit and allowing him to make that turn. I hope these four tips helped you think about your steering in a new way or maybe refreshed you on things you already know and help them to be a little bit easier, a little bit more understandable. If there's anything further that you would like me to add to this lesson in future videos, please let me know in the comments below. Keep enjoying your riding, keep growing and learning and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.