How to Stop "Bouncing" When You Ride

[Music] if you've ever felt like you can't ride without bouncing all over the place then I hope you're gonna enjoy this video so I'm Cali from crk training you're watching my weekly video show where I post a video on a horse training a riding or a horse care topic every week and one of the one of the most common questions that I get of when I meet people or that people send me an email is about how do I stop bouncing and it goes from if you're a beginner rider and you feel like right now you can't ride the trot or you're learning to ride the caner and you just can't ride those gates without feeling like you're bouncing and you're hitting the horses back or even if you're a more experienced rider and that bounce is a little bit more subtle maybe you just feel it now and then in a transition where you know that you're getting a little jarred you're getting a little bit of out of synch with your horse or maybe it's during a lead change or after a jump so I've found that writing is really an art of going with movement and as we progress as a rider we can start to actually initiate good movement but when we're having trouble with with bouncing it usually comes from excess tension or bracing somewhere in our body so if I start walking here on big boy so this is big boy he's a horse that I have here at my farm in training and I'm using him deliberately in today's video because big boy was only started under saddle a few months ago and one of the things that I like to make sure I do with young horses that I'm starting is to not always ride them perfectly so when I'm starting a young horse it's good to spend most of the time riding them very well meaning in good balance teaching the horse that he can be very comfortable and move well under a rider but there's also times that I want to demonstrate what I'm gonna do for you today and bounce a little bit on their back hit their back a little bit harder than I I deal II want to just so that they get used to that and they don't find it as a scary experience the first time it has Bin's with maybe their owner or with a different rider so if I ask big boy for a trot here and he's a pretty big moving horse so he can he can create a lot of bounce if I start to brace so there's lots of different places we can tense up in our body if I start to jam my heels down then all of a sudden the movement gets a lot harder big boy wants to stop and I can feel like I start the hit is back with each stride so for doing a sitting trot we want the sitting trot to be able to feel soft even on a big moving horse like big boy we want to feel like we're going up and down with the movement instead of bouncing but if I start to tighten almost any part of my body for example if I grip here with my legs to try to hold myself on you should see I start popping right out of the saddle and it becomes uncomfortable for both of us to keep going so that brace can happen a lot of different places the most common places that I see itwhen riders are complaining of bouncing is either bracing into the heels so trying to really push under the stirrups and almost lift themselves out of the saddle slightly or gripping through the legs so in an effort to try to hold themselves in and stop the bounce they actually create more of it or I see it just by getting really tight in the big gluts so when we think about muscle when we make our HUS our muscle hard and tight hard of muscle bounces so if I squeeze my glutes up trying to hold myself into the saddle I actually make to basically big balls of muscle that are going to make me start bouncing and this is true again whether we're doing tried whether we're doing canter whether we're working on improving the way that we ride through a transition or a lead change is when we can get everything soft and going with the horse we're going to be able to stop that bouncing feeling I tacked up Noel to be able to show you the canter because big boys pretty green at the canner but the same concept applies when we can er that if you experience a balancing at the canter it's most likely because you're accidentally bracing or getting tense somewhere at the cuter we also want to feel like we're moving or with our horse and that we can stay seated in the saddle or even in a light seat but not feeling like we're slapping the saddle but if I start to tense here on Noel if I start to push my heels down and grip with my leg you can see that immediately I start kind of flying out of the saddle now if I go back and reset and let my leg get soft again but now if I think about gripping with my butt to try to hold myself in again you can see as soon as I get tight back here I start popping right out of the saddle and it can even happen with tightness in our upper body so if I think about keeping my lower body as soft as I can but I pull my shoulders up and I get tight in my shoulders again I start to feel like I'm bouncing and like I'm coming right out of the saddle there are several reasons why we grip sometimes we grip because we're simply out of alignment so if we are leaning too far back we're leaning too far forward if we've got our legs in front of us and we don't have a good alignment through our body we can end up getting tight and getting tense different places in order to try to hold us on the horse and help us feel like we're in better balance we also sometimes grip when we are just new to learning the movement so if a movement is new and unfamiliar if it starts to trigger a bit of a stress response in us we go to start clamping hunkering down and holding on instead of going with the movement so you want to make sure that you've got a good alignment and you also want to make sure that you're working at a pace that's comfortable for you so that you're challenging your comfort level but you're not pushing so hard so fast that you don't even have the time to be able to think through and have a little more awareness of your body as you're riding so if you've really struggling at the canter may it's time to go back and work a little bit at the sitting trot or maybe it's time to just go back and work on those canter transitions before you start trying to go back to writing your canter figure eight now it's time for you to take this information and put it in action for yourself so it leave me a comment and just tell me one place where you're aware that you might get a little bit tense when you're writing go ahead and put it in the comments below and if you're watching this anywhere besides crk training blog comm go there and subscribe so you never miss another one of these videos

Channel: HorseClass

Views: 1,096,040

Keywords: how to stop bouncing, why am I bouncing riding, riding horses, stop bouncing when I ride

Id: wvC3_Rs4mXs

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017