Teaching a Horse to Mount From Both Sides

Teaching a horse to mount from both sides is important for a variety of situations, and it can be done by putting more weight on the stirrup of the weak side. Slowly move to mounting from the opposite side with helpful advice in this video on training horses.

Hi, I'm Rick Gore from Travis Equestrian Center, today we're going to talk about how to get your horse to let you mount him from both sides. This is something that a lot of people don't work on but, they probably should. If you're ever out on a trail or away from a mounting block and you're used to mounting that way and a stirrup breaks or you're on the side of a hill, you may not be able to mount and dismount from the same side that you and your horse are used to. So what we're going to do today is show you how to mount on both sides. And if I want my horse to stand and to teach him this, first of all, he's got to be good mounting on one side. So when I'm on out on this side, he needs to know to stand and let me mount and I can get on him. So after I know that he's good from me mounting on this side, I need to slowly introduce him to having weight on just this stirrup because if I've trained him on left side, he's only known that I stand up and get on him on just this side. So the first thing I may want to do is just lean this way a little bit and put all my weight on this stirrup, see he just kind of shifted his weight there, and now I'm going to sit back up. So I gave him a little cue that hey I might get off on this side. Then maybe I'll just stand on that and I'll bring my leg over just a little bit to where I can get back on if I have to, then I'll get back on and tell him "good boy". After a couple times of that I know he's good with that, maybe I'll bring my leg completely over and just lay on him. "Good boy" so he knows I'm on this side and then get back on him, so he's learning that hey it's not strange and odd to have somebody on this side. After I do this a few times, I get on and off him, he gets used to it, I say okay, he's probably ready, make sure my toes in my boots so I can get out in a hurry. Go ahead and dismount from this side. So now he's seen me get off on this side, never had me on this side before and he's like, Hmm, that's kind of strange no big deal, he accepted it. Then once he gets good at that, then I can go ahead and maybe just go halfway up, "good boy", see how he accepts it, see if he'll let me stand there, maybe get down and then after a few times go ahead and jump right back up on there. And that way, he'll let me mount up on both sides. Again if I'm on a hill, my stirrup breaks, for some reason my horse can't turn around, a hills too steep and I have to get on him, he has to know that I can get on and off him from either side. Makes my horse better, makes me better, makes the trail riding safer.