Welcome to the round pen, ladies and gentlemen, a place where you can take a
young, green horse who doesn't even know that you exist, a horse who's
completely out of his mind he's so green... or an old horse who just continually flips you
the metaphorical bird because he just hates having to do anything...
an old grouchy horse that needs to be restarted... You can bring either type of
horse into the round pen and you can transform that horse. You can turn that
same horse into a horse that will lead beside you with respect and deference, a
horse that can be caught out in the field... Better than that, a horse that will
actually turn and come to you on cue at a walk, a trot, even a lope... Now how cool is that?
But above all, the round pen is the place that you begin to start making
a great riding horse.
How did I get so small all of a sudden?
So bring your horse to the round pen; turn it loose; walk to the opposite side
of that round pen and take a good look at that horse because today marks a very
big day for the both of you. This is the day when you begin to turn that horse's
automatic "nos" at every request you make into automatic "yeses." We do this by
capitalizing on the simple fact that nature has programmed the horse to
understand that whoever causes the other to move his feet is the boss. So when you
get your horse to start moving his feet while you stand planted in the middle of
the round pen, the horse begins to think to himself "Hey maybe I'm not the one
calling the shots here." We don't punish the horse for getting the wrong answer...
Instead we motivate it to try and find the right one. When we push the horse a
little faster in the round pen, when we ask it to make its feet move a little
bit faster, whether around the round pen itself or through its turns, what we're
actually doing is we're motivating the horse to start looking for answers. We
want the horse to start thinking to himself "Whatever I'm doing isn't working."
"I need to start finding out what it's going to take to get this guy or gal to
stop making me hustle." We use rest as a reward, we use exercise as a motivator.
And when you get discouraged, remember: All it takes is time on your part,
persistence on your part... Keep motivating the horse and remember it can only move
six directions: Left, right, up, down, forward, and backward. If you keep
motivating the horse and you keep those feet moving
eventually the horse will find the right answer. And yes, you can do absolutely
everything that you'll see here in the round pen, everything I explain, you can
do with your horse attached to you via a lunge line... But a lunge line is just kind
of... Well, it's sort of a drag because you have to keep flipping the the line over
the horse's head as he changes direction. But, other than that it's completely
doable and people do it all the time. Also, if you don't have a round pen but
you have a square pen, if it's small enough, all you have to do is add some
rain barrels to the corners so that the horse won't hide in those corners and
boom, you got yourself a round pen every bit as good as the one I'm using here
today. Bear in mind that the one I am using here today is 60 feet across. If
your round pen is much bigger than that what happens is that the horse goes to
the other side and he stops, and then you go to the other side
and he goes to the opposite side again, and he stops again, and then you play a
little game of tag where the horse learns that he can beat you from one
side to the other and he can take a little rest. What you learn is that
you're going to have a heart attack if you don't figure out something different.
And that "something different" is to make a smaller round pen. This one is 60 feet across.
Yes...
Take two...
No, there are no age restrictions in the round pen.
However, you have to: A) Know that your horse is healthy enough to be doing this. So if
you have any questions, ask your vet. Number two, yes you can train a foal in
the round pen. You can do everything you see here, everything I'm going to explain,
you can do with a foal or a weanling in the round pen. But understand that a very
young horse, its lungs haven't developed fully yet and so if you push it too hard
you can damage it for life. So factor accordingly. A great tip to keep in mind
if you're actually working with a foal, with a weanling, is that if the horse is
sweating, you're pushing it too hard. So back off, use less motivation, use your
big brain and figure out a way to keep the horse motivated without pushing it
so hard. Again, if the baby is sweating, you're pushing it too hard.
So you don't want to ask a baby to run very often, if at all, okay? So if you see me asking for
you to ask the horse, an older horse, to speed up, perhaps to to break into a lope,
then just refactor that for a baby's sake and ask it to just speed up for
another 2% of the speed that you're getting. But what happens quite often is
that they'll come into the round pen and they're very nervous. They're away from
their mother; they don't know what's going on and they'll just start running,
sometimes blindly. If you have a foal or a weanling and it just starts running
with no rhyme or reason, then what you need to do is use your body language
to step sort of in front of that horse to ask it to turn several times in any
direction. Ask it to turn a few times and those turns will slow the horse down.
Be real businesslike in your moves; be very relaxed and as a matter of fact and do
what you can to just keep everything nice and calm. Occasionally you can apply
a little bit of motivation by asking the horse to pick up a lope, but by and large,
almost all the time with a very young horse,
you're going to be working at a walk or a trot. And keep our rule in mind: If the
foal or the weanling breaks into a sweat, just tell yourself you're pushing
it too hard. Take a break and when you start again make sure that you
apply less pressure on that horse. And when you're working with a weanling what
you can do to stack the cards in your favor is to tie its mother on the other
side of the round pen. Now not only will that pacify the horse because his mother
is close, but also, when you begin teaching the horse to do its turns, the
mother on the other side of the round pen will act as a magnet and draw the baby toward it.
This is going to take you about one week of concerted effort.
That's five days in a row of one- to two-hour sessions. Remember, if you get a
break for water, if you get a break to rest, the horse gets the same. Don't ever
double-team the horse; don't ever pass the horse on to somebody else.
With regards to equipment that you will need in the round pen... I like a lunge
whip because there's no coiling necessary. I can snap this thing over and
over and over and over and I never have to coil up diddly-squat. Get yourself the
biggest lunge whip you can find. The bigger the lunge whip, the less running
that you're gonna have to do. Speaking of which, don't go wearing boots out in the
round pen. If you're doing the training, then you need to have gym shoes on.
So, what we're trying to teach our horse here today is "You keep moving until I
tell you to do something differently." At first it's going to look in this very
first step as if the horse is round penning you because you are going to
have to hustle to keep that horse moving in the correct direction at the right
speed. But of course, here in this very first step we want to change that. What
we want to be able to do by the end of this first lesson is for you to be able
to stand in the center of the round pen as the horse travels around the
perimeter of the round pen at a speed and direction you choose for as long as
you choose. You're going to have to move around a whole lot, especially when you
first begin, but every chance you get you need to continually try to get yourself
back to the center of the pen because, again, the whole goal here is for you to
be standing in the center of the pen as the horse does the revolutions. So later
when we're riding the horse, we want to be able to say "trot" or cue the horse to
trot and it just stays in a trot... because when was the last time you said
"trot trot trot" to your horse? You don't. You ask it to trot one time and it trots
until you tell it to do something differently. Well, you begin to
teach that idea to the horse, "Do 'A' until I tell you to do 'B,'" here in the round pen.
When you ask the horse to pick up a trot and trot to the left around the round
pen until you ask it to turn to go to the right around the round pen, that's
what you're teaching the horse: "Do 'A' until I tell you to do 'B.'" So the very
first thing you're going to do in round penning, the very first step, is to get
the horse into the round pen and turning to the left.
The first step in the round pen
is to get your horse moving in a circle to the left or to the right at the same
speed for three revolutions without slowing down, without changing direction.
So that's where we start.
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