Leg pressure?

Question

How can i get my horse to be more consistent with leg pressure?

Answer 1

Unfortunately it is hard to decipher what exactly you mean from so little information.

Leg pressure is a term which is so often misused.

We must remember that in the horses' mind (or brain if you like) any form of pressure is not natural or something that they want to 'get away' from. Therefore if we have some light pressure with the right leg only, the newly trained horse would do all it can to relieve such pressure. If the horse moves forward with such pressure, we stop him and still pressure him, however if he moves over to the left (which most would), we take our leg off and therefore he has figured out a way to relieve this pressure. Likewise the same with the left leg and moving to the right. If we put some pressure on both sides he relizes that if he moves forward (away) you will stop pressuring him.

This is a natural horse instinct and we must work with it to get our animal to do what we want with him. Now we have to look to where this may come into your particular horse's issue.

Now if you are referring to a horse who will not respond to leg pressure to move forward, we must think why not? Maybe he has been trained this way in the past, maybe something he doesn't like is ahead, maybe he is associating this with something bad. Each problem has to be isolated when working with horses to get to the bottom of it. You must realise that there are three options with a difficult horse..

1) there is something wrong/nagging at the animal not to do the said thing (trained incorrectly or association witha bad thing for example)

2) The horse has not been taught to do this correctly

3) the horse is quite frankly, being a pain in the bum and knows quite well that you will give in.

I know the 3rd one sounds harsh but some horses are just like that. Personally, I have a small gelding who quite frankly is a pain in the butt, one day very forward, next day very sluggy. He needs a good arguement to tell him who is boss or I will give him a good smack up the butt.

I know this is probably too broad of a nature for your specific problem but knowing what it is, it is hard to address. If you want to email me I have no issues with this. [e-mail]

Good Luck!