RoundPen Intro: How & Why Horse Training Starts Here

Welcome to the round pen, ladies and gentlemen, a place where you can take a young, green horse who doesn’t even know that you exist, a horse who’s completely out of his mind he’s so green… or an old horse who just continually flips you the metaphorical bird because he just hates having to do anything… an old grouchy horse that needs to be restarted… You can bring either type of horse into the round pen and you can transform that horse. You can turn that same horse into a horse that will lead beside you with respect and deference, a horse that can be caught out in the field… Better than that, a horse that will actually turn and come to you on cue at a walk, a trot, even a lope… Now how cool is that? But above all, the round pen is the place that you begin to start making a great riding horse.

How did I get so small all of a sudden?

So bring your horse to the round pen; turn it loose; walk to the opposite side of that round pen and take a good look at that horse because today marks a very big day for the both of you. This is the day when you begin to turn that horse’s automatic “no’s” at every request you make into automatic “yeses.” We do this by capitalizing on the simple fact that nature has programmed the horse to understand that whoever causes the other to move his feet is the boss. So when you get your horse to start moving his feet while you stand planted in the middle of the round pen, the horse begins to think to himself “Hey maybe I’m not the one calling the shots here.”

We don’t punish the horse for getting the wrong answer… Instead we motivate it to try and find the right one. When we push the horse a little faster in the round pen, when we ask it to make its feet move a little bit faster, whether around the round pen itself or through its turns, what we’re actually doing is we’re motivating the horse to start looking for answers. We want the horse to start thinking to himself “Whatever I’m doing isn’t working.” “I need to start finding out what it’s going to take to get this guy or gal to stop making me hustle.” We use rest as a reward, we use exercise as a motivator. And when you get discouraged, remember: All it takes is time on your part, persistence on your part… Keep motivating the horse and remember it can only move six directions: Left, right, up, down, forward, and backward. If you keep motivating the horse and you keep those feet moving eventually the horse will find the right answer.

Yes, you can do absolutely everything that you’ll see here in the round pen, everything I explain, you can do with your horse attached to you via a lunge line… But a lunge line is just kind of… Well, it’s sort of a drag because you have to keep flipping the the line over the horse’s head as he changes direction. But, other than that it’s completely doable and people do it all the time. Also, if you don’t have a round pen but you have a square pen, if it’s small enough, all you have to do is add some rain barrels to the corners so that the horse won’t hide in those corners and boom, you got yourself a round pen every bit as good as the one I’m using here today. Bear in mind that the one I am using here today is 60 feet across. If your round pen is much bigger than that what happens is that the horse goes to the other side and he stops, and then you go to the other side and he goes to the opposite side again, and he stops again, and then you play a little game of tag where the horse learns that he can beat you from one side to the other and he can take a little rest. What you learn is that you’re going to have a heart attack if you don’t figure out something different. And that “something different” is to make a smaller round pen. This one is 60 feet across.

No, there are no age restrictions in the round pen. However, you have to: A) Know that your horse is healthy enough to be doing this. So if you have any questions, ask your vet. Number two, yes you can train a foal in the round pen. You can do everything you see here, everything I’m going to explain, you can do with a foal or a weanling in the round pen. But understand that a very young horse, its lungs haven’t developed fully yet and so if you push it too hard you can damage it for life. So factor accordingly. A great tip to keep in mind if you’re actually working with a foal, with a weanling, is that if the horse is sweating, you’re pushing it too hard. So back off, use less motivation, use your big brain and figure out a way to keep the horse motivated without pushing it so hard. Again, if the baby is sweating, you’re pushing it too hard.

You don’t want to ask a baby to run very often, if at all, okay? So if you see me asking for you to ask the horse, an older horse, to speed up, perhaps to to break into a lope, then just refactor that for a baby’s sake and ask it to just speed up for another 2% of the speed that you’re getting. But what happens quite often is that they’ll come into the round pen and they’re very nervous. They’re away from their mother; they don’t know what’s going on and they’ll just start running, sometimes blindly. If you have a foal or a weanling and it just starts running with no rhyme or reason, then what you need to do is use your body language to step sort of in front of that horse to ask it to turn several times in any direction. Ask it to turn a few times and those turns will slow the horse down.

Be real businesslike in your moves; be very relaxed and as a matter of fact and do what you can to just keep everything nice and calm. Occasionally you can apply a little bit of motivation by asking the horse to pick up a lope, but by and large, almost all the time with a very young horse, you’re going to be working at a walk or a trot. And keep our rule in mind: If the foal or the weanling breaks into a sweat, just tell yourself you’re pushing it too hard. Take a break and when you start again make sure that you apply less pressure on that horse. And when you’re working with a weanling what you can do to stack the cards in your favor is to tie its mother on the other side of the round pen. Now not only will that pacify the horse because his mother is close, but also, when you begin teaching the horse to do its turns, the mother on the other side of the round pen will act as a magnet and draw the baby toward it.

This is going to take you about one week of concerted effort. That’s five days in a row of one- to two-hour sessions. Remember, if you get a break for water, if you get a break to rest, the horse gets the same. Don’t ever double-team the horse; don’t ever pass the horse on to somebody else. With regards to equipment that you will need in the round pen… I like a lunge whip because there’s no coiling necessary. I can snap this thing over and over and over and over and I never have to coil up diddly-squat. Get yourself the biggest lunge whip you can find. The bigger the lunge whip, the less running that you’re gonna have to do. Speaking of which, don’t go wearing boots out in the round pen. If you’re doing the training, then you need to have gym shoes on. So, what we’re trying to teach our horse here today is “You keep moving until I tell you to do something differently.”

At first it’s going to look in this very first step as if the horse is round penning you because you are going to have to hustle to keep that horse moving in the correct direction at the right speed. But of course, here in this very first step we want to change that. What we want to be able to do by the end of this first lesson is for you to be able to stand in the center of the round pen as the horse travels around the perimeter of the round pen at a speed and direction you choose for as long as you choose.

You’re going to have to move around a whole lot, especially when you first begin, but every chance you get you need to continually try to get yourself back to the center of the pen because, again, the whole goal here is for you to be standing in the center of the pen as the horse does the revolutions. So later when we’re riding the horse, we want to be able to say “trot” or cue the horse to trot and it just stays in a trot… because when was the last time you said “trot trot trot” to your horse? You don’t. You ask it to trot one time and it trots until you tell it to do something differently. Well, you begin to teach that idea to the horse, “Do ‘A’ until I tell you to do ‘B,'” here in the round pen. When you ask the horse to pick up a trot and trot to the left around the round pen until you ask it to turn to go to the right around the round pen, that’s what you’re teaching the horse: “Do ‘A’ until I tell you to do ‘B.'”

The very first thing you’re going to do in round penning, the very first step, is to get the horse into the round pen and turning to the left. The first step in the round pen is to get your horse moving in a circle to the left or to the right at the same speed for three revolutions without slowing down, without changing direction. So that’s where we start.