LESSONS

Learn Horsemanship, Not Just How to Ride

Whether it is your horse or ours, we start each rider off doing a “join up” with its horse in the round pen. By taking the tack off the horse in the round pen, you find out what the horse thinks of you; how to read your horse’s body language; and how to establish leadership with your own body language. After join up, we use ground school exercises to teach you how to ask the horse to yield various parts of its body. Both you and the horse learn the positioning on the ground, where it is easy to see what part of the horse’s body you are touching, how little pressure it takes to get a response and you don’t have to worry about your balance on the horse. Once the exercises are mastered on the ground, we put you on the horse bareback. Riding bareback lets you feel the horse’s muscles telegraph its intentions before it moves; teaches you to use your seat and legs to give cues to the horse; and to develop the balance needed for a good seat. Only after mastering yields and transitions bareback do you go back to using the saddle. To read how our clients feel about taking lessons with us, click on: Mystic Paso Fino Ranch - Testimonials

Why Anger and Frustration are Problems

By recognizing the horse’s “try” by releasing pressure, your relationship will develop more quickly. If you get frustrated or angry, the horse focuses more on escape or self-defense and has difficulty learning. If your horse does something wrong and you get angry, its behavior gets worse, not better. Sometimes the biggest hurdle is learning to relax enough to communicate effectively with the horse. By learning to eliminate fear and anger and communicate effectively, you will find that your horse’s behavioral problem will generally disappear.

Leadership Skills

Using natural horsemanship makes profound and positive changes in your relationship with your horse. Beyond the emotional reward of having your horse elect to follow your “feel,” you get a safer and more enjoyable riding partner. You may also find that how you communicate with your horse spills over to how you communicate in your personal and work environments. Once you experience the results gained by clarity, consistency, and recognizing the slightest try, you will want to try out those approaches in the rest of your life, with equally rewarding results.

Videos

To find out more about our approach to natural horsemanship lessons check out the video on the Round Pen as your Classroom on the Training page and the following video on teaching bravery to horse and rider on the Trail Course: