Training
FRONT LEG I
Freedom PATRICK HOPGOOD Freeing up a horse’s front legs is the key to a great sliding stop
am sure many of you reiners have experienced a stop that has felt back breaking. I am sure you would agree
that isn’t what a correct stop should feel like. A correct sliding stop should be smooth, easy to sit to and almost like you are gliding across the sand. When a horse does a correct stop it feels great! The key to this is freeing up the front end. In a horse’s early training, and indeed in maintaining their training, we back a horse up after they have stopped to reinforce the idea of going backwards. This is so that when they hear the word ‘Whoa’ they are not at all thinking forwards. I have said this before in previous articles, when teaching a horse to stop the first step is to say ‘Whoa’, the second step is to pull the reins (if they have not stopped on ‘Whoa’) and the third and final step is to back your horse up three to five steps. If you say ‘Whoa’ and your horses stops and backs ups a few steps, your horse is now ‘stopping.’ However, backing them up after every stop can eventually lead to them becoming ‘bracey’ with their front legs rather than just bracing their hind legs. This is
Horse stopping freely with his front end
due to them getting their front legs ready to back up and this needs addressing. Before we focus on freeing up the horse’s front legs to get a smooth sliding stop, your horse needs to be able to stop. This means that every time you are loping your horse and you say ‘Whoa’ he immediately stops and buries his hind quarters in the ground. You must achieve this before moving on to the next step of smoothing out the stop. I normally will have around six to eight months of training on a horse before I will start to address the problem of bracing with the front end. Your horse will also need to be
Spinning a horse after a stop to free up his front end
stopping and sliding at least eight feet otherwise it does not matter if the front end is free or not as they wont be stopping far enough to need to move / travel with their front
legs. FIXING THE FRONT
If you stop your horse and they are jarring your back but using their hind end this is when they are not free in the front end. It is quite simple to fix. If I am having any problems with a horse being bracey I have two techniques. 1) The first step I use to start addressing this problem is instead of backing my horse up a few steps after the stop I wait until the horse is completely stopped then I will turn my horse around (spin) about four or five times either way. I do this because if you think about what a turnaround is mechanically, it is the front end moving around the hind end. Since the problem is that the front end is not free enough, this exercise will help get it moving. 2) If that exercise has not worked enough the next technique I use is to walk the horse out of the stop. Although I can not stress enough, do not do this to your horse unless they are a solid stopping horse. The other
May/June 2012
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