How to Train a Horse to Stop

Train a horse to stop by walking the horse forward, pulling back on the reins and using your voice to tell the horse to stop. Work on teaching a horse to stop before the horse is ever ridden with advice from an equestrian team head coach in this video on horse training.

One of the first things we train our horses to do is to stop. It's obviously important that we have breaks just as another tool to communicate with our horse and for safety reasons. So to begin with, we'll pick up my reigns and we're essentially going to walk on and lightly pull back and use your voice, woow. And hopefully by the time you get on your horse already has an idea that your voice means stop, because you'll have already worked on lunging your horse. And also if you've ground driven your horse you'll already have trained them to have an idea about the pressure meaning to stop, even the basic leading that we do with a halter, we put pressure on the stop, so they should already have that basic idea, but in order to really get that ingrained in them we're going to practice it many times, the walking on, and woow, stop, and the walking on, and woow, stop. And as I ask her to stop, not only am I using my weight, I mean my voice and my reign, but I'm also using my weight to sit a little bit heavier and to help tell her to stop by shifting back with my seat.