What Makes A Horse Safe to Ride?

What makes a horse safe to ride?

When I first started training horses, I thought a lot about exposure—getting horses used to all kinds of stimuli and situations.

I thought a lot about installing “safety buttons”: a one-rein stop, a reliable stop, ways to shut down movement when things went wrong.

I still think exposure has value, and emergency measures certainly have their place. But over time I’ve become less interested in stopping movement and more interested in helping horses move well.

Because many of the things we do in the name of safety can give us a false sense of security.

What really makes a horse safe is balance.

One of the most dangerous byproducts of training horses to be “safe” is that we often create locked-up shoulders. We teach horses to tolerate pressure, tolerate stimuli, and suppress movement without giving them the tools to organize their bodies effectively.

When a horse’s shoulders are locked up, we’re often riding a ticking time bomb.

As long as conditions are favorable, everything may appear fine. But add the right ingredients—bad weather, a new environment, separation from other horses, physical tension, fear—and suddenly there is very little available to us.

A horse cannot be truly relaxed, physically or mentally, when the shoulders are braced and immobile.

To me, safety looks different now than it once did.

I want a horse that can move. A horse that can rebalance. A horse that can step, bend, yield, and reorganize itself when pressure arrives.

So these days, one of my highest priorities is creating mobility in the shoulders and balance throughout the entire body.

Because balance gives a horse options.

And horses with options feel less often the need to panic.