10/10/2025
Resist grabbing the front end!
You are having a lovely schooling session with your horse who is working beautifully on the bit. You get a little bit in his way down the reins, normally the inside one causing a block of his hind legs coming through and instant tension to his mouth. You didn’t mean to, but here we are. He stiffens against your hands and pulls his head up. Your reaction either escalates it before you get him back and reinforces this bad habit to your horse of grabbing the reins and sticking his head in the air, or it encourages him to reengage his hindlegs, connect to your outside rein and soften around your inside leg, therefore, allowing you to have a soft inside rein.
What I often see in these moments is the rider grabbing the front end in an attempt to fix it and the rider’s legs coming off the horse’s sides. I would say that this is quite a natural reaction as we are sitting facing the horse’s front end, watching its head fly up into the air and feeling it pull our arms as it tightens against the reins. The feedback I get from riders I have coached in these situations is that they feel frustrated and a bit angry. Those emotions make the rider even more inclined to tense up and pull back on the horse’s mouth. Again, you end up giving your horse a harder mouth and less confidence in the contact.
Here is what you can do to educate the horse and get your good connection back. Firstly, never abandon your horse’s sides with your legs in these moments. More than ever do you need your leg on your horse. I am going to give you a simple exercise that can help you. If you are not already on one, immediately form a 15 to 20 meter circle. Riding an accurate circle with 4 turning points (remember always turn your horse from your outside aids) will help you to keep your legs on your horse and start to think about your horse becoming banana shaped around your inside leg, which is by the girth. As you form this circle start to encourage a bit of leg yield on the circle - like you are spiralling out to make the circle a bit bigger. In this way you are using your inside leg a bit more which is encouraging the horse to go to your outside rein, so try to have a nice consistent outside rein for your horse to go to. An image you can have in your mind which may help is that if you are on a right rein circle, you are asking your horse to turn to the right, but at the same time asking his body to go out to the left and keep thinking of him being a banana shaped around your right leg as you do this.
What this does is place the horse’s inside hind leg more underneath his belly and connects him up to your outside rein. With your inside rein think of slight opening flexions which are angled a little to the middle of the circle. The inside rein flexion should never come back towards yourself as that is blocking the hind leg, and it must be as quick to release/soften as it is to ask. The inside leg by the girth maintains the horse’s flexion when the inside rein softens and the feeling you want to have is that you don’t need your inside rein once your horse is connected back up from your inside leg to your outside rein and in self carriage. It can be soft and in neutral, ready to make another little flexion when needed.
Happy riding xx💕🐴
In my newest post, you can see the video explanation of this training tip! Here is the link https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BcZKts8Jg/ !
