The #1 Groundwork Exercise to Become A Confident Leader To Your Horse

While there are several must-know groundwork exercises that I strongly recommend every horse owner and horse should know how to do, the secret sauce lies in one particular exercise to getting the whole journey started to becoming a trusted leader to your horse. 

That exercise is Disengaging the Hindquarters. 

What is Disengaging the Hindquarters?

That’s where a horse plants his front feet still and pivots around them with his hindquarters. His inside hind foot crosses over in front of his outside hind foot, moving his butt away from you, with the end goal to have him stopped and facing you.  

How Disengaging the Hindquarters gets control of the mind

There are essentially three ways to get control of the horse's mind. That is to create movement, redirect movement, or restrict movement. 

In a horse’s mind, the alpha/ boss mare/ leader of the herd (whatever term you choose to call it) tells the horses lower in the pecking order when and where to move their feet.  ‘This way to fresh water, that way away from danger, this way to food, that way away from my food!’

When we are disengaging the hindquarters, we are either creating or redirecting our horse’s movement just as the leading boss mare would. “That way away from stepping on me, This way to focus your attention on me.” 

When you redirect the horse’s attention onto you, it can mean a number of things.

For a lazy horse, it comes across as listen here, I can and will make you work, this is how I will do it, but if you do what I ask I’ll leave you alone in between jobs. 

The reason disengaging the hindquarters is so easy to accomplish first with a super lazy horse is because of the horse’s physiology. Horses naturally carry 65% - 70% of their weight on their front end, so asking them to plant their front feet and move the back feet only, requires a lot less effort than if we were trying to create movement in the shoulders. As soon as we can show them that regardless of how lazy they are, it’s easy for us to get them to move their feet where we want them, it almost works like a magic trick to the horse of “oh man, I can’t get away with refusing to move anymore.”

When a horse is frozen in fear, this is when they really want a leader telling them how to escape danger that they absolutely know without a doubt exists just up ahead. By redirecting their attention back onto you, you’re telling them through your energy that “You don’t see me running, I have control of your feet therefore I have control of the situation, and I’m telling you it’s best to stay right here and focus on me.” 

If faced with a horse that is high energy, very jumpy, and a flight risk, disengaging the hindquarters allows us to utilize that energy to get them quickly facing us again and again to redirect that attention back onto us, reminding them “Hey, we’re still here. You need to focus on me, remember.”

Extra Safety Factors Disengaging the Hindquarters can give

Another important safety factor to keep in mind is that horses know where their legs are at all times, they know they are fragile and without good legs to escape they are done for, and they prefer to run through a mouse hole before they step on you at risk of hurting their legs. That doesn’t mean they won’t plow you over with their shoulders, but their feet are way less likely to step on you when they panic and bolt in flight mode. If the horse’s attention is relatively focused on us, they will be much more likely to avoid running over top of us when trying to bolt away from danger. (This is very important to keep in mind when working with colts.)

The horse’s hindquarters are also the engine, so if you can keep taking away their balance and hitting the off switch on that engine by making them disengage, they are less likely to get away from you. 

If you would like to see a demonstration of what disengaging the hindquarters on a horse looks like from one of my clinics, click the video to play!