Training Tip: Help for an Out-of-Control Barrel Horse

Question: I practice the Method with my barrel horse and have gotten great results. He rides great at home and even before a race in the warm-up pen. He’s soft, tuned in to me and relaxed. As soon as I run a pattern on him it’s like a light switches and he becomes a completely different horse. He’s hot and impulsive and hard to control. He raises his head in the air and pushes against my hands. What can I do about this?

Answer: This is a very common problem with horses who compete in any sort of speed event. You have to remember that you’re creating your own monster. You spend all week telling your horse to be calm, relaxed and soft, and then on the weekend, you haul to an event and you’re spanking him and asking him to run like his life depends on it. When you take a horse to that level, he’s not just going to immediately relax and chill out. It’s going to take some effort on your part to remind him to relax, calm down and get soft to you again.

When I was a kid, I played polocrosse. It’s an intense game with a lot of galloping. Imagine six reactive barrel horses running a pattern at the same time and that’s more or less what a polocrosse field looks like. We’d wreck our horses during a game, which means they’d get hot and impulsive and stiff throughout their bodies. When we got them home, we’d work on getting them to be soft and supple.

By the middle of the week, they’d be back to where they were before the game. Then on the weekend, we’d play another game and wreck them again. It’s a never-ending process. It’s just the nature of the beast. You can’t run the wheels off them and expect them to come back and be quiet and relaxed like an old ranch gelding.

I experience the same thing with my reined cow horses. After the fence work portion of the event, where we gallop down the fence and turn a cow and then circle it up, those horses are on the peck; they’re a little heavy in the bridle and ready to go. After an event, I have to spend a lot of time getting them to decompress and come back to me.

All of that is a long way of telling you that horses are nothing more than maintenance with legs. It sounds like you’re doing a great job of training your horse. If you run him in speed events and blow his mind, you have to accept that when you get home you’re going to have to rebuild him, so to speak. You have to take the time to remind him to be relaxed and soft and supple.

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