when you have the reins try squeezing the reins (in out in out) on the inside to put her head down if that dosent work they make a second set of reins that attach to your girth to make him keep his head down.

There are no “tricks”. A horse will soften the poll/jaw and come “on the bit” when trained and ridden correctly from back to front. Sawing the reins is a common site, but has no place in real dressage. If you’re having problems, I’d recommend working with a good, reputable trainer/instructor.

It’s not a trick, its called training. As a warm up exercise, you should encourage your horse to reach down, stretch down for the bit contact. Place her on contact, then loosen up a bit, massage your fingers on the reins, and let her reach for the contact. Eventually, she can walk and maybe trot around the ring with her head nearly to the ground, and your hands on the buckles. This is a good warm up exercise, because when you ask for collection, you will need those muscles.

There are no quick fixes.

If you drag the horss head down then the horse will be in a false outline and any good judge will mark you down even more then if the horses head was up.

What you need to do is alot more schooling.
You need to push the horse up into the bridle and aske the horse to step under and take the weight on the inside hind leg.

The horse should shorten, round its back, power from its hind end and lift off the forehand.
Only then should you worry about where its head is and normaly because the horse is working properly the horses head will be where it is supposed to be!

Try a bungee..

Its a training aid which will make her put her head down she will have no choose in the matter and after a lt of work with it she will get used to having her head in that position and you will not need it on her any more.. You will find one in your local saddlery shop.. When you are working with it on her play with your hands to get her head down don’t be totally reliant on it.. You do this by sponging the rains and giving and taking keep your hands low as if you are guiding her into the position… Good luck with it xxx

There are no tricks. Only proper training will get your horse’s head down and the proper muscles developed. Getting him moving and ‘through’ from the back end is the only way to make it happen.

It is not a quick process, but it is a rewarding process.

this is what i do with a 4 year old filly im riding and she was really bad at dropping her head at first. I open and close my fingers around the reins, half halt i guess, and move my hands forwards in back alternating sides, left right left right left right and so forth till she droppps her head the i let up on the pressure and tell her good job.

If she brings her head back up i repeate and she has learned to keep it down very wel this way. Good luck!

Gently tug back and forth on the reins.
or try using a marting gail x

a martingale

There are no tricks to this and there are many ways to wreck your horse by excessive focus on head position.

“Outline” or collection is something that emerges from physical conditioning and from training in a variety of manuevers including gait transitions, backup and lateral work.

The healthy, relaxed and athletic horse will assume a certain natural outline as a result of these activities – which will include the best head position the horse can find to execute them.

The “outline” of the horse is the next to the last result of good training (the last is the persistence of the results of all the prior levels of training in multiple environments). Messing with head position as if it were outline and as if it could get you an outline faster will typically lead to false collection (http://www.Sustainabledressage.Com/collection/false_collection.Php), devaluing both go and stop cues (http://www.Aebc.Com.Au/articles/28/) and generating stress that will manifest in many vices ranging from small and annoying to debilitating. Gadgets to produce false collection abound (http://www.Sustainabledressage.Com/tack/gadgets.Php), and when used they damage or destroy the rider or trainer’s connection to the horse’s actual emotional or training status. Even something as simple as a german martingale puts resistance into the reins that makes it harder to feel how a horse is reacting to cues, and, of course, it tends to devalue the stop and go cues, creating the much-reviled “hard mouth” and “lazy horse”.

When your horse is “stubborn” about assuming a frame, it can be for many reasons:

1) The frame you are asking for is not a frame that is good for the horse. Many false-collection frames cause neck and back pain.

2) The horse may not be athletically able to assume the frame either due to conformation, to inappropriately conditioned or stretched muscles in needed locations, lack of strength in some muscles or lack of flexibilty.

3) The horse may not be emotionally able to assume the frame. One of the most pardoxical and ironic sights in training is a trainer using intimidation or force to make a horse appear relaxed. A tense horse is a tense horse. And his ability to flex athletically will be reduced.

He may put his head high or poke his nose out. Find out why he’s tense and reduce his stress, and his outline will improve, though it may not look like when you expect.

It may be less agressively contracted or low.

The horse may want to put his head in a position where he can have depth perception of more than a two foot circle of ground just in front of his feet. He may not want to create a hollow back and a seahorse head because it hurts to do that and makes him less strong. He may be stressed because the hold on the bit and driving him into it makes him unable to satisfy you – he can’t go and stop at the same time.

My suggestion to you is to focus on the manuevers.

The test is about the manuevers and your connection to the horse.

The whole horse, nose to tail. Help your horse be relaxed and athletic and get a good score because your horse is happy to work.

I hope this helps – even though I am sure it’s not the answer you want.

There are no tricks, only training. If you are having lots of trouble, ask your trainer to help you, or even have them get on to school her.

The “trick” is that you will need to ride the horse in a way that enables the horse to relax her muscles, engage the hind end and lift the back, which in turn encourages the horse to relax and stretch down through the neck and jaw into your contact.

The absolute most important thing is that your horse’s muscles are loose and relaxed and that nothing is tense or bracing. If anything is tense or bracing, that is your first task. Once everything is loose and swingy, then add in a little forward impulsion and you should be able to achieve a little bit of cadence (which is that feeling that you’re riding a big boingy beach ball that is just happily and carelessly rolling and bouncing along).

Another very important thing to think of is straightness. A lot of people make the huge mistake of trying to work on bending before they’ve even gotten the horse connected and round, when actually, once you get the horse connected and round, 99% of the time they are already set up to give the appropriate amount of bend naturally and you barely have to do anything.

So if you’ve been working on trying to bend around your circles, you might want to stop that for a little while (or if you’ve noticed that one shoulder tends to lead or the hindquarters tend to trail to one side, that’s a good thing to try to work on). A lot of students I’ve had have tried to do this because you’re always hearing about bend, but just like with rounding, if you try to achieve bend before all of the pieces are in place, you just end up with a crooked trainwreck and most often end up teaching the horse how to drop their shoulder out. Once the shoulder falls out, all of the energy leaks right out of that broken point, the back no longer connects the hind legs to the front legs, and therefore there is no possible way to get the hind end to engage and step under and push the back upward. So, if this is something you’ve been doing, you may want to work on softening that outside rein to try to bring the horse’s nose away from the inside and pop that shoulder back in from the outside. Once you have the horse alligned and straight, all of the muscles are loose and boingy, there is forward impulsion, you should have a much easier time rounding your horse. Those are all very important pieces to the puzzle, and it has to incorporate the horse’s entire body, not just the head going down.

There are all sorts of training aides out there (draw reins, martingales, etc) and I don’t recommend using any of them. They don’t train the horse to develop the balance and muscle to be able to do these things well; only proper training can do that.

*sigh*

Getting a horse to move correctly isn’t that hard. All you have to do is learn to ride really well!

You obviously don’t, otherwise you’d know that you can’t haul the head in and expect the horse to still be able to move.