Starting Young Horses: Commonsense Skills and Sensible Steps to a Solid Training Foundation

With a straightforward system that any horse owner can follow, Starting Young Horses presents a comprehensive guide to navigating a horse’s first years under saddle.

The most critical stage of training a horse is establishing a solid foundation for future skill development. By ensuring essential skills are in place, horses are physically and mentally prepared to respond to human requests and adapt to new environments, leading to healthier, happier horses, no matter their discipline.

Trainer and clinician Jason Irwin began starting horses as a kid on his family ranch. Through experience and a lifetime of studying horses and horsemen, he has developed a straightforward, safe, and fair-minded system for ensuring young horses have what they need to get along in a human’s world. The horses he starts go on to excel in any discipline, Western or English, and do so with the willingness that comes with true understanding. In these pages, Irwin provides the steps anyone can follow to ensure the same success with their horse:

- Ground manners that set the stage for all further training
- Groundwork exercises for advancing to saddling and riding
- Sensible and sensitive roundpen work
- First bridling and first saddling
- “Riding from the ground” to teach steering, stopping, and turning
- Easy-to-use ground-driving exercises
- How to tell when a horse is ready for the first ride and set him up for success

Irwin explains how to take the horse’s personality and individuality into consideration, adjusting as needed to keep him willing. He looks at the “different” horses who might need a creative approach, and provides guidance on how to identify “bad days” and know when to quit without losing ground. “In the past,” Irwin writes, “there was very often a feeling that the first rides on a horse were something that a person ‘just needed to get through’…. Thankfully, that’s changing.” With his patient, practical guidance, the first rides—and all the rides after that—can be something both horse and rider enjoy.