Horse Training: Teaching a Horse to Back

We're going to go through the basic maneuvers that a horse goes through.
We're going to start with backing. Backing is one of the most important things to keep a horse light in front.
If you pull on his face and he keeps going forward, or he won't give you his face,
or he won't back up, then you have control problems.
So we're going to start with backing up. I'm going to ask Cleve, he's on a green horse,
to step right in here and show you a little about starting to back a young horse.
This horse will back up, but he is a little bit resistant. What we're going to do to back the horse up
first of all, we'll take a light hold of his face, and if he's light and he gives us his nose a little bit,
and then we're going to bump him with our feet to get him to move.
Alright, if he gets a little resistant to step back up, if he gets a little nervous, we just stay patient, wait for it
and when he relaxes and gives us his feet, gives us his face, then we'll have a horse that will back up and we'll keep developing
on that. So he walks back up here and he tries it again.
He takes a light hold of his face, and kind of locks his hands, we don't want to keep putting pressure
on the horse's face, just lock our hands, and this time the horse just drops his nose and backs up quietly.
When we're doing this, the horse out to be able to get freedom from our hands at any time.
So if we take hold of his face, he should be able to drop his face and get slack in the reins.
If he can do that, then we've got a horse that's pretty light.
If we keep pulling, and the horse gives his face and starts backing up, then he starts trying to figure out if there's something else to do
so we want the horse to get really really responsive with his feet, as well as with his face.
At any time, we want our hands in such a position that the horse can always get relief from that pressure.
So if we take a hold of him, and he drops his nose and gives his feet, he can get relief,
and ultimately we'll have a horse that will back up on a loose rein with almost no pressure at all on him
and if we want speed, we just add feet which is where our gas comes from.
So we bump the horse a little bit,
to get speed, and then we've got a really responsive horse.
You can develop that over a period of time. When you first start, you'll hold him and bump, just like Cleve did on his horse,
*bump, bump, bump, bump, and when you start getting response, release.
It will get better and better, until you have a horse that won't let you take hold of his face because he'll be very responsive to your feet
and he knows where he can get the release of pressure.
Remember, when you put pressure on your horse, on its mouth and on its side, to give him an escape route to the back
and as soon as he gives us a good response, we release the pressure.
Pressure and release, and consistency will get us a really good back up.