Comfortable Reining Transitions

Professional reining horseman and recently a million dollar rider, Matt Mills, demonstrates and offers training tips in his “tip of the week” video. His lecture is based on slowing and managing younger reining horses while being comfortable when transitioning through paces of the lope. 

Based off the video, Matt encourages the horse to have a very forward paced lope and then carries through with faster lead changes. He looks for the horse to give and relax into the cues after a fast paced transition. One key point he makes is humming to your horse and sitting back. From my own experience, when you’re comfortable your horse is also going to be at ease too. So when you adjust yourself to let go of the high paced energy your horse will notice and realize that it’s okay to slow down at that point. A quote I find very known to be true is, “I’m going to give him a choice to either take that cue to slow down or he has to work harder.” In a sense this is making it the horse’s idea with a cue. 

Week 1 (9/25/2020)