Riding Magazine Q &A

Question: My horse is very athletic and moves beautifully but he is exceptionally strong on the bit. My trainer wants me to work out with weights to get stronger, and also to use a gag bit. The problem seems to be getting worse.  He was winning reserve or grand champion. Is there anything you can recommend to help me?

Answer: Your horse needs to learn to yield to the bit rather than you getting stronger. You could pump iron every day, but with most horses weighing in excess of a thousand pounds, even Governor Schwarzenegger can’t “out-muscle” a horse.  In any case, it’s not about strength, it’s about yielding.

Competitive riders share one critical goal within most disciplines, indeed even with recreational riders: you want your horse to be very light laterally, as well as soft and nicely supple.  This occurs only by teaching your horse to “give” or yield to the bit. Once you start using a more severe bit and are also riding him “stronger” yourself, meaning putting more pressure on the horse’s mouth, you will get additional control… but for only for a limited a period of time.  Instead what happens with a horse that is already resistant to the bit, is that as you add more and more pressure via a severe bit and lots of contact with your hands, is that the horse just increases it’s resistance and tolerance to the pressure. Eventually it will become so hardened that even the most severe bit and strong contact will mean little to nothing to your horse.  You will have inadvertently created a situation where you will have no control of your horse when you need it. And just as important for truly competitive riders, you are also minimizing your horse’s performance potential.  It is a simple matter of biomechanical physics.  If the horse is resisting the bit, then he is on the forehand. And when a horse is on the forehand, he is not engaging. Without engagement your horse is not being physically used anything close to his full potential!  The horse’s power and balance comes from properly using those hindquarters, which they are not doing when they are riding on the bit.

 So what we must do with every horse, it to teach them to yield.  Before that can happen, we as riders must first learn how to give/release the pressure the very moment the horse softens and gives. It is so common that we create a heavy horse, a horse that really pulls on us, by us releasing the contact when they pull the reins through our hands. We create the situation where they are stiff and tend to brace against the contact because we have been releasing contact (without meaning to) when there is pressure. As I mention frequently, because it is the absolute key to everything we do in horse training, horses learn by pressure and release. Once we teach them to soften and give to pressure, they then become lighter and far more responsive to us.

 Once they really have learned to give to pressure, they become soft and willing, light on the forehand and able to use all that wonderful power in their hindquarters.  Consider power steering in a car.  If you have driven a car without it, you can imagine the difference in effort it takes to turn those front wheels.  That is very similar to riding a horse that is heavy on the bit and pulls.  But the work has to begin with you knowing when to release, and not doing it too soon or too late! 

 The most basic exercise to being with is what I call simple gives.  You start doing gives by using one rein. Take up about 4 to 6 inches of rein to one side and hold until the horse responds by yielding and then immediately release. Guess what, when you first start doing gives, you may be holding for a long time, two minutes to twenty minutes -- if the horse is heavy and really used to pressure. It is critical that once you have asked for a give, you must be committed to holding steady until that horse does yield, otherwise you have thrown away the cue and have made the horse a little heavier rather than lighter. To help keep yourself consistent and maintain the pressure (we want to be matching the pressure the horse is offering, not pulling on the horse), anchor your hand to a spot on the saddle. You do not have to hang on, just use that spot to keep your hand steady.  As soon as the horse gives to the pressure (even tiny yields at first), release, reward, pick-up on the rein and do it again.  Over time as you have gotten the horse to respond to the pressure and see that you are consistently getting a softening of the jaw and notable slacking of the rein, then go to the other side and repeat the exercise. By the way, this is an exercise that can take hundreds if not thousands of repetitions.  Once your horse is soft and responsive on both sides independently, then you are ready to go to two reins. Essentially, you will be doing gives with both hands independently, and you have to maintain the consistency you created by doing the one rein gives.

 When you have really mastered gives with your horse, you will then have your power steering! You do not need a bigger bit or to be an “Iron-man” candidate to control your horse.  What you need is to invest the time, patience and consistency into schooling your horse to yield to the bit through employing proper pressure and release timing yourself.