Teaching turn on the haunches

Happy New Year, friends!

I’d like to start my first blog post of 2020 off with a how-to video for teaching a very valuable exercise, turn on the haunches.

Turn on the haunches, also called forequarter yields, was always one of the harder exercises for me and Forrest when we were first starting out. So, naturally, I avoided it like the plague for a long time. Spoiler alert, challenging exercises are often the ones your horse needs the most! I eventually figured this out (sometimes all it takes is a doctorate degree to notice the obvious) and now we’re starting to look pretty good. 

I posted a video on my social media pages last week of me playing with turns on the haunches with Forrest at liberty, and I had several great questions from folks wondering how to get to that point. Since I’m a very visual learner myself, I figured making a video would be the best way to answer those questions.

I think exercises like this one are essential from both a training and physical fitness perspective. They develop communication between you and each of the horse’s feet, teach the horse to pay attention to where he puts his feet, develop the horse’s proprioception, and strengthen his core muscles.

I hope you enjoy this video explaining the steps I take to teach this exercise.

Patreon subscribers - you can be on the lookout for a video with even more in depth explanations and a downloadable training guide to take you step by step through the process!

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