There are two styles of attire for beginning riders to advanced riders. Those styles are Western and English. Make sure you have acceptable attire for either style with help from a Certified Horsemanship Association instructor in this video on beginning horseback riding.
Hi, my name's Maryjo Turnbull, and I'm here at Silver Buckle Ranch, in Brushberry, Washington, and today I'm going to talk to you about proper attire for beginning horsemanship riders. We have two styles of riding, of course; one is Western and one is English, so there is acceptable attire for both kinds of riding. We're going to start from the bottom and work our way up, so we're going to start with our shoes. As you can tell, I have boots on. They're cowboy boots with this low heel. I always prefer that everybody rides in about a one-inch heel, our roper heel. This keeps your feet safe in your stirrups. If you wear sneakers or anything with a completely flat sole you risk the chance of slipping your foot through the stirrup, and if you were to fall off you might be dragged. My friend Ivy here has paddock boots on, and these are pretty typical for English riding. So, if you kind of look, and she'll turn her foot, you can see that she also has a heel. When we talk about pants, we always want to wear long pants. We don't want to wear shorts and we don't want to wear Capri's, but we want to wear long pants. In Western riding, you generally see everyone wearing jeans. In English riding, you'll see everyone wearing breeches, which fit a little bit tighter than blue jeans do. From there, you always, if you ride outside a lot, you would generally prefer to see riders with long sleeves. In the winter, of course, you want to dress in layers, and when you wear a jacket you want to always have it zipped up from going on up there to the top here. We don't want to see riders with big hoop earrings. That's not safe. They can get hung up on different parts of the tack as you mount and dismount, so it's best if you wear small earrings. And then, we don't like to see a lot of jewelry around the neck, and that, again, is for safety reasons. You can get hung up on the saddle horn or in other pieces of the tack. We do like to have all our riders wearing helmets. It's highly recommended, and I'm just going to show how we put a helmet on correctly. So, when we wear our helmets, we want them to fit down on top of our head. We want them to be ASTM certified helmets. A bicycle helmet does not qualify as a riding helmet when we ride horses. It needs to be an equestrian certified helmet, okay? When we fit our helmet down we want to make sure our ponytail is all the way to the bottom of the helmet so it doesn't interfere with the helmet. We wear the helmet down on top of our eyebrows; not back like a bonnet. So, this would be an example of wearing it incorrectly, like a bonnet. We want to ride in it correctly, which is right on top of our eyebrows. And to be sure that it fits us correctly, we would know if we took our helmet like this on our head, and you can see how Ivy's eyebrows go up and down. Then, we know that her helmet fits correctly. We want to have it fit underneath her chin snugly, and we don't want to pinch her when we do this but we want it just to fit snug; snap right there, and not have any gap, and that would be a safe way to wear your riding helmet. So again, we want to have safe shoes, long pants, non-baggy clothes, our jackets zipped up, no dangling jewelry, and a helmet for extra safety.
