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HOW LONG TO TRAIN A HORSE

So the time has come to train that 2 or 3 year old horse you raised or bought as a youngster. Now, yes you ride and enjoy riding your well broke horse. BUT, you are not a trainer and know that you need help to get your young horse trained. Or at least I hope you think about hiring a professional trainer as home trained horses by inexperienced people most often result in a horse that knows nothing about neck reining correctly, turning smoothly and easily, stopping in proper form, leg aids, just pretty much get on and ride but don’t expect anything fancy for the rest of their lives. They also are never going to be worth near as much money as a properly started and trained horse.

So, here is the problem. You are going to take your horse to a professional trainer, BUT ONLY FOR 30 DAYS because you are shocked at the cost of that trainer per month. Yes, after 30 days, you bring the horse back home, you can now get on him and ride. But that is about all you can do because he is only started and still will never neck rein correctly, turn easily, stop in proper form, nothing. Because he still needs weeks and weeks of training. So here is a basic guide to how long it takes to train a horse depending on your experience with horses and ability to continue his training on your own.

To avoid confusion here, we are only going to talk about your horse being a pleasure to ride, do a bit of this and a bit of that but not be specifically trained for the SHOW ring or RODEO sports, as that takes months of more advanced training.

• 30 days training: Only if you have taken lessons on horsemanship, and you, yourself have been taught correctly how to teach a young horse, and know how to advance the horse. Otherwise, he will only develop bad habits and never get past the green horse stage. Oh, you can ride him but so much for the pleasure of riding a truly well broke horse.
• 60 days training: Only if you have taken lessons yourself and/or spent your life working with many horses. Hours spent in the saddle on many horses will give you a big helping hand here. Of course, you still have to have learned or earned the experience necessary to advance the horse to the higher level of someday being well broke.
• 90 days training: Your horse is (providing the trainer who has been working with him for 90 days is good at what he does and says), should now have a pretty good handle on things. He will still need an experienced rider with the training capabilities of advancing him to the final stage of being well broke.
• 4 to 6 months training: The person who is getting all your money so you can no longer afford to take the family on holidays that year, will have the horse better broke than 90% of the so called broke horses loping around out there. This is where things get a bit sticky. Either you, the rider knows how to correctly neck rein a horse, cue a horse to turn, or stop, or backup, or side-pass or you, the rider will still end up teaching him bad habits and slowly destroy all these expensive months of training. Simply put, next time take the family on holidays with your hard-earned money.
• 6 plus months training: For specialized horse events, such as showing and competing. But guess what? If you do not sit a horse properly, have some concept of how to correctly cue the horse, it does not matter if he has years of training, he will still develop bad habits such as opening his mouth to avoid the bit, stopping on his front end instead of his back end, getting sloppy in his turns, not standing still to be mounted, getting hard to catch because he doesn’t want you on him, even bucking or refusing to stop. Maybe shying even. Actually to many things to mention here, that a horse will begin doing because his rider is making mistakes on him.

PLEASE NOTE: ILL FITTING TACK SUCH AS YOUR SADDLE NOT FITTING THE HORSE AND THE WRONG BIT IN HIS MOUTH CAUSES MANY BAD HABITS IN EVEN THE BEST TRAINED HORSE. MORE ON TACK AT A LATER DATE.