hi I'm Kelley King from crk training and welcome to our first QA video so today we're going to answer a question from Maine in Canada and means question is my mayor despite being mature horse is sometimes so fresh that when I try to warm up walking and trotting that she tries to canter although I bring her back to a walk and try to keep her calm she gets very frustrated and wants to go faster sometimes throwing her head or trying to canter on the spot that is a great question being thank you for asking it and I picked this one that to answer because I think so many people have this problem a lot of us have horses that are you know pretty hot and fractious can really easily trigger it and get really nervous and especially those of us that do the more high speed sports like jumpers venting barrel racing where we have our horses revved up all the time they get used to kind of you know doing that and being really excited and you know it's not always the easiest to calm them down and some horses even if they've never done any of those sports they still just tend to be very hot so I picked Molly for this video because I've worked on a lot of this kind of stuff with her she's gotten tons better since I got her but what I got her about three years ago she was very fractious very energetic you know wouldn't stand still at the mounting block constantly wanted to go go go and we still have times that we have to work through it so the first thing that I just wanted to say on this topic is if your horse comes out and they're really nervous and they're fractious just on the ground or they won't stand still with the mounting block that's really your first red flag that you're probably not going to have a quiet relaxed ride most horses you know don't normally calm down just when you get on them if anything that will usually escalate them more so I'd like to show you a few quick ground exercises that I would do to work on this and then how I would take that to the mounting block and what I would do under stattle so the first thing that we're going to do is I'm just going to ask her to back up and she's already really calm coming out here but just this simple little exercise of trying to keep your feet pretty still and having her back up and come back towards you just mainly using the rope and your body position can it's really amazing how this can really kind of calm down a more fractious excitable horse so I'm going to do it one more time we're just going to back up now what I wanted to come towards me notice I just kind of rock back on my heels a little bit might even take a step back basically I'm just relaxing my posture and inviting her to come back up next we're going to move on to lunging and I think the ones that I'm going to show you is probably a little bit different than what you're used to so when a lot of people use lunging before they ride you know a hot horse or a nervous horse they do it to tire them out and I think a lot of us know that unless you're going to be out here lunging for like thirty minutes or more it's probably not going to do that much to tire your horse out and personally I don't really want to spend thirty minutes lunging before I ride so what we do on the lunge is a lot of slow work and a lot of transitions which is the same as what we're going to do understand to get our horses a little bit quieter so I'm going to ask her to walk out here so I'm instead using the lunging instead of to get my horse tired I'm using it to make sure that my horse is focused on me which basically means I want their ear and their eye on me and I want their nose in a little bit and when I stop moving my feet girl I want her to stop and I want her to check in I'm going to send her out again so we do a lot of transitions on the lunch line and then what we do stop it's a lot of just stop and stand and relax and I think that really helps the horse relax too so that they learn that they get to stop and take a little break same thing when we take it up to the trot on this little circle we're just going to try out a few steps I'm never going to come right back to a walk and Molly's the type of horse that if I would just put her out here and ask her to trot around and around and around she would get a lot more excited that she is right now and a lot of horses are like that when you start working them at speed the adrenaline kicks in and you see even they're after that little bit of trot work she's started to escalate a little bit I had to actually remind her to stop instead of her just being focused in when I was stopping but this is the kind of work you want it doesn't even have to be on the lunge line even if you just do some leading and you kind of practice going forward stopping and standing so you want to feel like your horse is relaxed and focus before you start your ride so here with Molly I don't feel like I quite have it yet so when she starts stopping that's better as soon as I stop that's going to be my cue that I'm ready to get on and you'll start to know your horse I know her pretty well so if she's just kind of going on autopilot and just going around that outside circle without paying attention to me then I know I might need to wake her up with another backup and try it again that was better and we could really do a whole lunch egg video we'll have one of them for you at some point but again what I kind of want to get across with this is just do the slow work get them calm before you get on so now we're going to go to the mounting block and again if your horse is I'm really fidgeting at the mounting block that's another red flag that they're probably not going to be super quiet when you start riding and there are a lot of horses that might be really quiet with the ground work and as soon as you come over here to introduce the mounting blocks they get a little bit more nervous and that can kind of tell you that they could just have some you know nerves issues with the mounting block or maybe they're not even totally comfortable with them with you on their back so this is why one I want them to come right over stand quietly we take a minute to kind of chill I want to stand still as I'm getting on and then I want to be able to sit up here and just sit here so that they're not moving off as soon as I hop one I want to be able to pick up my stirrups and then what I do ask her to walk off we're just going to walk a few steps and then we're going to stop and stand again and it depends on you know where your horse is with getting used to all this if I had a horse that you know wasn't standing still at that mounting block we'd be getting on and off a few times until they could stand quietly and be relaxed as I'm getting on and sitting there before we walk forward and then we're just going to slowly progress this block forward some more stop and stand and relax and I think you can kind of get the idea of you know where this is going and how it progresses it does take a lot of patience and it takes a lot of discipline to work through this you know this slowly but if you have one of those nervous energy horses that you really want to be able to just house them relax and take a deep breath this is how to do it lots of slow work and as they get quieter that's when you start to increase it so like here I would do this as she starts walking forward and stopping and standing quietly that we a few steps to try that we would make the trot longer and just go forward like that so this was a great question to answer and I hope you enjoyed it hope it was helpful we're still on June so it's still question answer month if you have any other question that you would like to see answered in one of our videos please email or leave your question in the blog comment and of course if you like this video please subscribe so that we can send you weekly updates every Friday thank you