Mounting a horse involves bouncing up as quickly as possible to minimize the discomfort of the horse. Get tips on mounting a horse with help from a riding instructor in this series on horseback riding.
Hi, my name is Lisa. I'm an instructor at Enterprise Farms, and today I'm going to be showing you how to mount a horse. Today, we'll be working with Dylan. The first thing you want to do is you take your reins, and you want to make sure they are over the horse's head, and just rest the buckle over on the withers, and then next you're going to want to run down your stirrups. As you can see now, they're tucked away nice and neatly, and this is how you want it to be when you're moving the horse around so the irons don't hit them in the sides. But as, when we're mounting up, we do something called running the irons down, and so you just take it out like that. When you're mounting larger horses, I like to just run my iron down a little bit longer, just so I don't have to lift my leg up as much, and then you can adjust them once you're mounted. A quick tip for just to eyeball how long you're iron should be when you're on the ground is to put your hand in the middle of your saddle, and the iron should hit you right about at your armpit. So, after we've done that, you're going to want to hold the reins while you're mounting up, and put your other hand on the pommel. You don't want to grab the pommel and the cantle because you can pull the saddle over and we don't want that. Then you just put the ball of your foot on the iron, grab a little mane if you need to, and then just bounce. Some things to remember when you're mounting, you always want to do it as quickly as you can, you don't want to be scrambling up onto your horse and making it uncomfortable for them. Be sure to swing your right leg up and over their hind quarters and not smack them in the butt when you're getting up there, and to sit down gently on to their back and just, always keep a good hold of the reins because if they do spook, you don't want your horse to run away. If you have some trouble mounting, or your horse is just too tall, you can always use a mounting block or a large stump, or have somebody weight the offside stirrup, because sometimes the saddle does slide off, and if your saddle is sliding, the most likely thing is that you haven't checked your girth. So, you always want to do that before you mount a horse, and that is how you would mount a horse.
