In-hand work is a staple for successful training with any horse. It improves communication and balance through simple exercises.
A few problems it can improve; your horse won’t stand quietly, difficulty working on the right (off) side of the horse, your horse ignores you and /or has it’s attention off in the distance, leaning on the hand, problems with halts, traveling crooked.
The first thing I do with all horses is the “start and stop” exercise. The initial focus is to teach the horse to follow the body position of the handler and create an understanding between them. It is important you start this exercise on the rail, otherwise, the horse ends up swinging away from you and it is not effective.
Here is an example:
The goal of this exercise is for the horse to move forward and rein back without the influence of the hand or the whip, they follow what our body is doing first. This allows us to influence the horses’ balance with the hand and/or whip because it is not creating the exercise but rather enhancing it.
A side note of this exercise: Because it teaches the horse to pay attention to our body position, should the horse spook they are more likely to go around you instead of into you!
Now, let’s talk about what we can do to create this conversation. Here are a few different horses and their reactions to the exercise.
This horse wants to turn the neck toward the handler every time they stop:
The horse did not follow the body language of the handler when she stopped, it continued forward. When the handler corrected in the hand, the horses’ response was to turn the head in and lean on the inside shoulder. We had to change the aid we used to tell the horse to stop when she did.
Instead of using the hand when the horse went past the handler, we used the whip in front of the nose as a visual. This way, we stop the body of the horse and not effect the neck (allow it to turn in).
This is a Friesian mare that wants to go past the handler with her neck inverted. She is naturally built with the tendency to invert her neck and hollow her back. This makes it hard for her to relax her neck and lift her back.
After the initial correction in the hand to not go past the handler she starts to control her shoulders instead of reacting upward with her neck. This leads to her relaxing, lengthening her body and start to think about using her topline. This is critical to a good balance.
Once you have this idea, the next step is to use the same exercise to straighten the horse and teach it to carry even weight in their shoulders.
Here is and example of the horse backing up by putting the haunches in and the shoulders out (toward the rail).
As you can hear in the audio; to straighten the horse we have to address the opposite shoulder of the direction the haunches are moving. In this case, we ask the horse to move the weight off the outside shoulder to correct the haunches from coming in. This understanding on the horses’ part then translates to correcting the same balance problem while moving forward.
This next horse is putting the haunches out and the shoulders in.
The same philosophy applies to this horse. The haunches are out so the solution is to move the horse off the inside shoulder. When we ask the horse to move the weight off the shoulder that is loading (leaning), they naturally straighten.
This is an important idea for the horse. We can then translate this understanding to correcting their balance while moving forward and carrying weight.
This exercise is the place to start for in-hand work. Without it, you can not ask the horse to move laterally to supple and strengthen them. It also makes it much safer to be around them if they are paying attention to your position!
Thank you to all my students that contribute to the images!
Kim Robare
© Kim Robare
