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How to Ride a Horse

Horseback Riding Tips:
Beginners

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Intermediate

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Foal Training

Horse Weaning Pt 1

Horse Weaning Pt 2

How to Ride a Horse:
Beginners Guide to Safe Horseback Riding

Learning how to ride a horse can be a fun and exciting experience that can bring joy to everyone regardless of age. Children can start learning to ride a horse or pony as young as the age of 5 while it is never too late for any adult to get into horseback riding. What I would like to discuss in this article is how to engage in safe horseback riding so that your experience riding a horse can be as painless and flawless as possible.



There are many horseback riding instructors out there that are not properly qualified to teach someone how to ride a horse. One reason may be that their main concern is graduating as many students as they can to make room for new students. By doing this, they will skip ahead over some of the basic fundamentals and required skills of safe horseback riding and move on to more advanced techniques too fast. This will not only hault the students skills in horseback riding but will almost guarantee quite a number of hard falls and loss of balance that may even discourage the student from continuing. These types of falls can be deadly and should be avoided at all costs. As a matter of fact, most of them are totally unnecessary and wouldn't even occur if the student was properly taught the basics.

When teaching a student how to ride a horse, many instructors have a difficult time with beginners, especially those whose mistakes keep recurring every class session. Usually the reason for this is that the instructors will teach the early horseback riding skills out of order which leads to a great number of problems. Too many times I have witnessed horseback riding instructors limit their classes to the typical start, stop and steer sessions which seriously limits the student's potential. While other instructors may also incorporate a lesson on how to hold the reins and even sitting up on the horse with your heels down, they still could be doing a lot more for the beginner horseback rider. For instance, experienced horseback riding instructors will tell you how important it is for student to learn the base of horseback riding...the seat and leg. The seat and leg is referred to as the base of riding a horse because it must be in place before anything else can be done. Therefore it is the foundation for everything in safe horseback riding.

Below I have listed 5 guidelines for the beginner horseback rider in regards to the order in which the seat must go together:

1. Use of correct alignment must be used at all times. This means everything including your shoulder, point of hip, back of heel, and ears should be in a line perpendicular to the horizon.

2. Maintain a low center of gravity by sitting heavy on the seat rather than depressing your heel.

3. Relax your lower back. You do not want to have your back locked. Instead try to follow the movement of the horse's back with your seat.

4. Replace natural instincts with safe reflexes. You must learn to move your upper body around and stabilize yourself to counter the horse's sudden jerky movements. Also keep your lower leg stabilized at the trot.

5. In order to communicate instructions to the horse, your legs must remain free and hands kept steady at all times. A solid deep base or soft balanced seat will ensure a safer horseback riding session and allow for more freedom in your ride.