How To Steer a Horse (STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE)

hey everyone so today we're going back to the basics and i'm going to show you how to steer a horse and before we get started why don't you comment your favorite horse movie or tv show down below so right off the bat one of the first things you would learn if you were to go to a horseback riding lesson is how to steer your horse and so in the beginning you're going to be taught how to steer just off of your rain pressure so i'm going to show that to you now and then i'm also going to incorporate some leg pressure and seat movement so you can steer your horse more effectively and communicate better with them so in order to steer correctly you need to be able to hold your reins correctly so real quick i'm just going to review how you can hold your reins and then we'll cover steering so to hold your reins correctly you can put the rain in between your pinky and your ring finger and then you're gonna put your thumbs on top and so this will give you nice secure grip on your reins and then another thing you can do is just lean back and hold some pressure to see if they're even so right now i see that my reins are even so that means i can communicate with my horse more effectively okay so to properly steer your horse with your reins what you're gonna do is you're just gonna open your hand in the direction you want the horse to go so if i want the horse to go right i'll open this hand you see his nose tilts this way if i want to go left i'll open this hand and so what you're basically doing is you're just kind of opening your elbow right here and bringing your hand out rather than back because back will ask the horse to back up so see if i go like that he starts backing so i want to open out and not back so if you're new to this you may feel compelled to pull your arm all the way out here to turn your horse but the good news is all you have to do is just slightly open your hand away from the horse's neck to encourage them to move this way as you continue to ride you'll learn how to give more subtle cues so that you don't have to pull your arm all the way over here but for now if you're new to this and you have to do this in order to not pull back then that's fine and that will just help get you used to opening your hand to steer the horse rather than pulling back so another thing to note is the wider you open your hand the tighter the horse will turn so if you'll see here i open my hand really wide tucker turns really tight compared to if i just kind of open my hand here he'll go more in a bigger circle good boy so if you're steering with this hand you may be wondering what you do with the other hand that you're not using believe it or not but this hand and this rein have a job as well so if i'm staying with my right rein here what i'm gonna do with my left brain is i'm just gonna hold it not tight so i'm pulling but just with pressure on it so i have that connection with the horse's mouth and i'm just gonna keep it steady right here and this is going to act as a wall to the horse so you may find that sometimes when you're steering like this your horse may pop this shoulder out or start drifting this way so when i have pressure on this rain and i'm holding it steady that's going to block the horse from unnecessarily drifting into this area so i'm on my circle here so my inside hand will be open slightly and i'm going to show you guys real quick what happens when i drop this other ring and i'm just trying to steer with it so you can see he can come in if he wants or he may like push his shoulder out and drift this way or i'm sure a lot of you have been on horses where you're going around the ring and suddenly you're just in the middle of the ring and the horse just drifted over there let me show you what you can do when you use your outside rain or your opposite rain to correct the horse from drifting or from popping their shoulder out so now i'm holding pressure on my outside brain right here and as you can see i have much more control of the shape of my circle so i can just have this pressure to keep him from popping his shoulder or from drifting in or from drifting out so real quick let's discuss what to do if your horse has a habit of drifting to the inside of the ring so a lot of lessened horses are like this and it can be really challenging if you're a new rider to understand how to correct this so one thing you probably feel like you need to do is pull them back to the rail so that means you feel like you have to grab this rain and pull them this way well believe it or not that actually helps them drift more into the center of the ring because when you pull on this ring and you leave this rain slack the horse can pop their shoulder and kind of just go like this so what you want to do in this situation is if you take your inside rain and hold it steady and have that pressure on it then you can kind of steer your horse back to the fence and they won't be able to pop this shoulder out so that'll help them stay straight and stay along the fence line so once you understand how to steer with your reins the next thing your instructor will teach you when it comes to steering is how to use your legs to encourage the horse to move into their turn so right now we're going to talk about leg pressure so let me show you guys what happens when you don't use leg pressure and you're trying to steer your horse just with your reins see he doesn't go anywhere all he does is turn his head one way or the other but he's not moving forward so if i'm standing still and i turn his head this way how do i encourage him to move in this direction right so what i can do if i'm turning him this way i can use the leg on the side that i'm turning towards and i'm going to squeeze and see he turns in this direction then so the leg that you're turning towards will help to encourage the horse to move their hind end and go in that direction you can also use leg pressure to prevent your horse from drifting so when a horse drifts they kind of drop the shoulder of the direction they want to go in so let's say he wants to drift this way he'll drop this shoulder and he'll drift along and step that way so what you can do when you apply leg pressure that holds him back up and encourages him to straighten up and get balanced again so he doesn't drift instead he balances straightens and goes forward so let's use the example where the horse is on the fence line and they like to drift to the inside of the ring we talked about how you can hold your inside rain steady to encourage them to stay straight but now you can also add leg pressure to your inside leg and that's going to hold the horse upright and not let them drop this shoulder and drift in so that's a great way to correct that habit and it's really effective so when you mastered steering your horse with your rain pressure and your leg pressure the next level is to learn how to steer your horse with your seat so when you're staring with your seat you're going to alter the angle of your hip to encourage the horse to go in a certain direction so let's say i wanted tucker to turn this way i would open this hip and i would close this hip and that's going to encourage him to go in this direction he's going to want to move into the space that i just opened with this hip so what this means is with this hip i'm just going to kind of open my thigh here and so that has that space that he can move into and if i want to turn the opposite way i can close it so when you learn to steer your horse off of your seat and your legs and you get really good at it sooner or later you'll be able to steer your horse without even using your reins so i'll show you guys some things that i like to do with my horse and i just like to practice i'm just using my seat instead of the pressure on my reins to steer my horse so if you want to get better with using your seat we made a whole video that just talks about improving your seat as you horseback ride so we'll put the link in the description where you can go check that out if this video helped you out at all please give us a thumbs up and go hit the subscribe button and stay tuned for more weekly horse videos [Music] [Music] now yeah

Channel: Equine Helper

Views: 73,768

Rating: 4.9708285 out of 5

Keywords: How to Steer a Horse, How to Steer and Turn a Horse

Id: UnZhR_TBLWg

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020