Hi, I’m Laura Newberry and this is our horse, Sergeant Murphy or Sarge as we like to call him. This is the first in, hopefully, many videos that I’m going to do. My friend, Stephanie, suggested I do one to how to teach a horse to stand still while mounting and Sergeant Murphy actually has a tendency to like to get antsy or dance around when somebody is trying to mount him just because we don’t ride him as often as the others, so we haven’t worked on that very much. I’m going to show you how to teach your horse to stand still while mounting.

I’m going to take the reins and just put my foot in and see he starts moving, so I’m going to pull back and tell him “whoa”, and try to keep my foot in the stirrup. Now that’s he’s calmed, I’m going to get on and see how he started to walk right there? I’m going to tell him “whoa” and back up. I’m going to put my other foot in the stirrup and I’m going to make him stand here for a while and this is the key to getting them to stand still while mounting is really getting them to be patient and wait for the cue to go.

He breathed a big breath there. That’s telling me that he’s relaxing, but I want to give it a little bit longer maybe. Nope. See? He thought I was trying to get him to go and I don’t want him to do that. That wasn’t the cue. I’m going to make him stand here for a while and then I’m going to get back off. I’m going to tell him “good boy.” Then we’re going to do that over and over a few times. There we go, I’m going to grab the reins, not too tight. Stick my foot in. He’s tall. He’s a lot taller than my other horse that I usually ride. He’s standing nicely now. I’m going to get on. Oh, no. Put my other foot in the stirrup and just make him wait. We’re just teaching patience and teaching him to wait for my cue to go. Good, he’s relaxing and that’s really good.

See, you can walk him around for a minute and then do it again. He’s also our horse that likes to go fast, so I’m going to do a video on how to slow your horse down. We’ll just do it over and over again until he’s waiting patiently and not even taking one step when I get in the saddle. I want to wait for him patiently while I’m getting in the saddle and wait patiently until I tell him to go.

Practice with him a few times. He’s gotten a little bit better and I’m going to show you a few more times. He should be pretty quiet now. There, good, he didn’t move at all. I’m getting my foot in the stirrups, adjusting my saddle and he shouldn’t move at all. The goal is to have the horse plant their feet and never move them at all until you ask them to. He’s doing perfect right now. I’m going to do it one more time.

You just work with them until they’re standing still at least for a few times in a row. You need to stand still before you give up.

If he moves I always ask him to go back to where he was so he understands he was not supposed to move. He’s moving less and less but he’s still moving so we just keep working with him. There we go. That was good. Try it again. There we go. That was good again. Good boy. See if he’ll do it one more time. Really good. Okay. I call it quits for right now with him. If you have a horse that needs work like this, just keep doing it and the key is to do this every time you mount your horse.

You want them to stand still until you ask them to move. Even if it takes hours, it’ll be worth it because then you’ll have a horse standing patiently and you won’t have the risk of injury or the stress that’s involved trying to mount a horse that’s spinning around. I hope this helped and I’ll see you next time.