SIDEPASS A HORSE | How to Teach 😊 🐴

Good boy. Welcome. Today we're going to be talking about teaching our horse how to side pass. This is a wonderful basic skill to have on your horse and helps improve your horse's flexibility. It helps improve your communication with him. So I'm going to walk you through step by step how I teach this movement. The first step is you want to make sure that you've done this on the ground. That sets your horse up for success, making it easier for him. He already understands what to do when you get under saddle. So if you want to know more about that, you can check out my video. I'll leave a link up here for in-hand work and I cover how to do that in the in-hand work. So let's get started. You're going to start off by riding your horse along the fence. You're moving him away from your left leg here as I'm going to the right. So I'm closing my left leg and I am opening my right rein to lead the shoulders to the right. And once Sonic's crossed over a few times, I'm going to reward him by walking out of it. Now if you're struggling with this movement, I recommend that you practice turn on the forehand as you can see me demonstrating here. This helps you learn how to control your horse's hind end and helps your horse understand how to move away from leg pressure. Once our horse is good at side passing along the rail there, we're going to take him off the rail and we're going to try this without the support of the rail. Now it's important to note that when we first start doing this, your horse may go a little bit forward, he may suck a little back. So if he starts to back up a little bit, I'm just going to close both legs, keep my hands forward and ask him to step up. If he starts to go through me, I'm going to quit riding and ask for the stop and maybe back him up a step if he passes me. So it's important when you start it off the rail that you're able to stop your horse off of your seat as you can see me doing here with Sonic. This is going to make it easier for him to understand if he goes past you how to stop in a relaxed way. So now I'm going to ask Sonic to step off on my left leg here and when I first do this, because this is new to him, you know right there you can see him back up a little bit. So I put both legs on, say no I want you to walk forward and then I just put my left leg on and just ask for you know just one or two steps over. Doesn't have to be perfect and then I'm going to reward him for that effort. What a good boy. And then as I do this more, I'm going to see if I can get a few more steps. So does he step over and can he go a couple of steps longer? That was very good. And then the difference between your side pass and your leg yield is side pass you want your horse to be just going straight over so there's no forward energy and a leg yield we're going forward and over. So remember when you're teaching this if you want your horse to be side passing that if he starts to go forward too much just simply ask for the stop, reward him and build off those little steps. I hope this video has helped you if you are just starting to teach your horse how to side pass. When we first start to teach any movement to our horses we want to try to keep it as simple as possible, reward very small tries on our horse. So if your horse just starts to step over even a little bit at the beginning, really reward him and give him a break for that and then just build off of those little tries each time you come out. I like to keep the sessions nice and short and positive when I'm introducing something new. So I hope that this was a help to you. I hope you keep enjoying your horses over this next week and I'll see you in the next video.