How to Ride a Horse WITHOUT a Saddle

so not only is riding bareback a great skill to have but it also makes you look pretty hardcore so today I'm going to show you everything you need to know to ride a horse bareback and before we get started make sure you like this video and subscribe to our channel for more weekly horse videos all right so I'm gonna go get ready to ride real quick okay now we're ready okay now that I'm on my horse let's cover our first point so the first point for becoming a better bareback rider is to learn to move your seat with the horses movements so you can do this in a saddle or you can do a bareback it's much more easier to feel the horses movements of bareback so that's a great place to start and when you move your seat bareback that's going to help you feel more secure on them compared to just being stiff and the horses moving and you're starting to like tip off but when you move your seat with the horse and you're moving with them it's way more easier to stay balanced compared to if you're doing something by being stiff and your horses doing something else so I'm gonna show you guys real quick and then you can go try it on your own okay so first I'm showing you guys what it looks like to not lose your seat so you can see that my seat is not moving at all my hips are not moving with the horse I'm just kind of sitting here and it'd be easy for me to get off balance and start leaning one way like that uh-oh start leaning this way and you can see my hips swinging with the movement before so take a moment the horses watch go side to side so I can just swing my hips naturally with the horse I don't have to force it I'll just let my body move with how the horse is moving and it's much more easier to be secure this way then when you trot you can feel that it's more of an up-and-down so you can move your seat up and down and make that a much more comfortable ride compared a4 just sip and you start bouncing and see as soon as I started bouncing he stopped okay so if you've ever ridden bareback before you're probably like wow this is way different compared to in a saddle because you don't have all the like constraints and security of the saddle to help you out and so it's very easy to get stiff when you're riding bareback the reason you get stiff riding horses is because you're trying to help your balance but in reality it doesn't really help that much and so when you get stiff you may like get like this and lean on the reins to help your balance or you may start bouncing like this but like trying to stay in your stirrups and so when you do that bareback it's gonna be really uncomfortable you're gonna start bouncing and you're gonna start going like this so it's important to learn how to just relax and stay calm and so if you're stiff at the walk if you feel yourself getting stiff and kind of like this at the walk I recommend not trying to try to canter make sure you get relaxed on the horse first at the walk and then once you're a relaxed turning transition and everything like that then you can go and do other gates like a trot and canter so my biggest tip for staying relaxed on your horse while riding bareback it's simply to focus on your breathing so if you're tense like this you're breathing automatically becomes fast in choppy so you're like you know but as soon as you start to focus you just feel relaxed go through you and then you like naturally sit back and you can just sit breathe and it helps you think more through your movements so okay I'm going to turn my horse that means I need to you know position myself so I'm gonna be secure for that turn so really focus on your breathing can help you relax and as I mentioned earlier don't advance until you're ready to go to the next level anybody okay so another great way to help you feel more secure on your horse bareback and not get stiff is to have a strong core and so I hate to break it to y'all but if you want a strong core sometimes you're gonna have to do some crunches or some sit-ups and things like that your balance comes from your core so if you have a strong core you're gonna have a good center of balance which is gonna make you feel way more secure on the horse compared to if you don't have these muscles then you're gonna feel more off-balance and then you're gonna get stiff so working these muscles will help a lot if you haven't written bareback a lot and then you suddenly start riding bareback you're gonna notice that these muscles will be really sore because you are working them to stay balanced so my next point for helping you ride bareback is to keep your weight in your heels just as you what if you're in the saddle so the reason you're told to keep your weight in your heels is because it helps Center your balance over the horse so it may not look like my weight is in my heels but it is I can guarantee you that I feel it so if you're new to riding bareback you may find that you are gripping the horse with your legs like with your knees like this trying to stay on when in reality that's gonna make it a lot more easier for you to fall off so when you put your weight in your heels your legs will just naturally wrap around the horse and your weight will be down so that's going to help secure you and also you know keep your legs not as stiff compared to if they're like this gripping to stay on so another way you may find that you grip your horse bareback besides gripping with your knee and that you grip with your heels like this I used to take my mom riding out all the time and we go out bareback and her horse would take off and I would see that she's gripping like this I'm like well no wonder that horses take off so it's important to keep your heels down you don't want to grip with your lower leg because that's actually telling your horse that it's time to go you know so we want to make sure you keep your weight down because you'll have control of your leg shoes better that way so another tip for feeling more secure bareback is to make sure your position is correct just because you're not in a saddle doesn't mean that your position changes you want to keep the same position and when you're in that correct riding position you're just gonna feel more secure and natural on the horse that means I'm gonna want my reins right you know thumbs up shoulders back my leg beneath me my leg wrapped around the horse looking up then I'll go forward keep my elbows at my side you know and when you do this you're just gonna feel much more secure compared to like straight legs my arms aren't gonna be bent I mean be like this I'm slouched now you want to sit up stay as you would in the saddle and you're gonna feel a lot more better about yourself so my next point is an important one about riding your horse bareback and it's for your own safety and that is go at your own pace if your friends are out galloping around in the field bareback but you've never ridden bareback it's probably not the best idea to make that your first thing you do once you get on your horse bareback you're gonna want to make sure you're balanced and you're secure at the walk and the trot in the camera before you go off galloping bareback so it's important to work at your own pace and stay at one gate until you feel secure and then you can go on to the next thing and before you know it you'll be jumping you'll be galloping through the fields you'll be like shoot I could compete doing this if you want to get good at bareback really fast the best thing you can do is just ride bareback all the time so I bet if you rode bareback every day for a week by the end of the week you'd probably feel secure enough to just go do whatever you want and just because you would have worked those muscles and those muscles on muscle memory and then you just would have also learned how to balance yourself in that timeframe so it's really not that hard to pick up you just have to do it in order to feel secure I have some days I'm just too lazy to tack up my horse so I'll ride them bareback for like three months before I'm like okay maybe I should put a saddle on again so the next thing I want to share with you guys is some things you can't ride in the saddle and both out of the saddle to help you build security and balance when you go to ride bareback so my first point is to take your stirrups off of your saddle and just ride without stirrups just to help you get used to that feeling of not having that security of the stirrup around your foot if you need it but that's a great way to help build like your leg muscles and your core and so once you practice without the stirrups for a while you're gonna feel much more secure and balanced just over your horse so when you get on bareback you're gonna be like oh this isn't that bad because I do this all the time in my saddle so some people will have like one day out of the week where they ride without stirrups just to maintain these muscles and also just to maintain like their Center about and so that's a great place to start if you want to start riding bareback so another thing you can do is practice riding without hands so I always recommend having an experienced horse person with you to lunge your horse just so someone's in control in case the horse were to do something but what you can do is just ride with your hands out at your side or you can have that like this and this is just teaching you not to rely on the pressure of the rain for your balance because if you bareback and you're doing that you're just gonna be yanking on the horse's mouth and that's not really good and so this is going to teach you to rely and make your center of gravity over the horse without your reins so if you can ride without hands for a moment and just learn to balance yourself over your horse without the pressure of the reins then that will help you write better bareback so our last point for helping yourself ride better bareback is to do a lot of transitions and turns and so if you do not feel balanced in the saddle doing these things then chances are you aren't gonna really feel balanced bareback doing these things so I recommend taking time to get balanced in the saddle and then you can go to do these things bareback if you've never really ridden bareback before you're gonna find these things really difficult and so just to help you you can just focus on those things in the beginning and I'm just gonna focus on training my horse one way than the other maybe do all helped to walk transition in and then I'll walk to trot transition him back down just to help me learn how to sit on the horse and how to balance myself during those movements and that will go a long way to help you feel secure on your horse so let me show you guys what this looks like so it's in this turn my board and the way these things are so hard for riders is because it means you have to shift your balance so when I turn for example my balance of shifting to the outside and that throws a lot of people off so I can then say what's the transition so like a transition throw your weight back and your balance back and so if you're not prepared for you make feel like you're flying backwards and so just practicing these things will help you a lot when it comes to just learning how to be secure on your horse bareback and learning how to balance yourself I can't tell you how many times I fell off bareback just where I wanted to go do a turn and you know the horse returning and of course that leg go up this way because I'd be you know so just good things to practice so if you're not already subscribe to our channel we're sharing new horse videos every week so make sure you go hit that subscribe button and give this video a thumbs up thank you to all of you who have already subscribed and I'd love to get to know you better so why don't you leave your horses name your name and how long you been riding and what discipline you like in the comments and I'll be sure to get back to you guys thank you guys so much for watching and happy trails [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Equine Helper

Views: 38,354

Rating: 4.9670873 out of 5

Keywords: How to Ride a Horse Without a Saddle, How to Ride a Horse Bareback

Id: YQNCCPYRvoo

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020