VIDEO TRAINING
If your horse carries its head too high here’s an exercise–for ground or saddle–designed to lower it! Throw away your tie downs and training forks!
Simply put, when you repeatedly “disengage” the back end of a horse, he (or she!) will soon begin carrying its head in a lower, more natural position. (You should also concentrate on using a lighter touch on those reins–but for that, you should see my other, “rein handling” videos.)
“Disengage” is a way of saying “The back end of the horse pivots around the front end.” Think “turn on the forehand” without leg pressure from the rider (as taught here).
Train Your Horse to Lower Its Head & Relax
Release on the Thought
Hey, don’t forget: If your horse’s head is always carried up about yay high, if it’s always up high in the air, what you need to remember is that the way that you get vertical flexion – that’s a fancy way of saying up and down – the way that you get the horse’s head to come down is by actually getting the horse’s head softer left to right.
Okay, so if you concentrate on simply bringing that horse’s head to the left and to the right softly with a nice soft neck, with a nice soft feeling through the reins, you’ll be surprised how that horse’s head will now suddenly come down down down and everything will look prettier and softer. The way that you can do this is simply by asking the horse to disengage his rear end – and that’s just a fancy way of saying he stops the front but the back end keeps moving around in a circle. So you can work on this a couple of different ways.
If you want to turn this into a ground training exercise, if you’d like to do this from the safety of the ground, then outfit your horse in a bit and a bridle and get your horse walking around you in a circle. You’d be in the center of the circle with your horse walking around you. You would not be moving away from that particular spot that you’re in by more than a few inches.
Your horse is shaped like a banana. On one side he’s shaped like this, on the other side he’s shaped like this… So what works well on one side may not work quite so well on the other. When you’re trying to disengage your horse, when you’re trying to get the front to stop and the rear end to continue to move, what you need to try is one of two things on both sides. First, try taking the rein and pulling the horse’s nose towards his tail. The other thing that you can try is to take that very same rein – again very near the horse’s mouth – and pull his nose not towards his tail but above it, up towards his hip. Okay, so what’ll work on one side is for you to pull the nose towards the tail and what’ll work on the other side is to pull the nose towards the upper hip. So it’s just a matter of an angle.
When you first begin practicing this all you have to do is watch the shoulder nearest you and when it stops and yet the back end of the horse is moving, that’s a disengagement. Stop, pet the horse, move forward, and try it again.
If you’re riding your horse, on one side what will work is pulling the horse’s nose directly towards his tail, and what will work on the other side of the horse is for you to take the rein directly towards your opposite shoulder. It’s important when you do this that in between each repetition that you pause just long enough to hear something. That signals to the horse that it’s the end of the exercise. It’s not a 30-minute exercise. It’s a three or four second exercise. So drop the reins, pause long enough to hear the traffic go by or your neighbors laughing or another horse whinnying…
Okay, move the horse forward and then repeat the entire exercise. It’s important that with each repetition that you practice on a different side of the horse. So with the first repetition, practice on the left side, the second repetition practice on the right side. Switch back and forth each time.
So all you have to do then to bring your horse’s head down is to go out and practice this exercise. Go out and practice on the ground or get on your horse’s back and do it that way. So practice this for 20 minutes today and 20 minutes tomorrow and 20 minutes the next day and sooner rather than later what you’re going to find is that your horse is going to carry his head a lot lower. He’s going to be much more maneuverable and you’re going to have a lot more fun riding.