Treasure Valley Hoofbeats

06/29/2025

🫶🏼🫶🏼🫶🏼

06/25/2025

Well, that’s fantastic… Looks like we are definitely not riding today 

06/22/2025

Had a fantastic clinic with Noodle and Amy Skinner today! Lessons are important for everyone, including riding coaches andd instructors!

06/19/2025

This little chonky monkey had his first lesson with a non-teenage rider (not including his own kid) and rocked it!! Way to go Lightning, the Super Sonic Pony!

06/17/2025

Riders don’t think that this stuff makes a difference, but it really does! Over the years I’ve had plenty of riders tell me that they finally got their horse leaning into the barrel turn… Please don’t do this, 🫣🫣please don’t encourage your horse to lean! 🤕

Any horse can run around a barrel, just like any horse can pop over a cross rail. But if you truly want to get good at something, there’s always going to be a technical side to it. If you don’t take time to learn technique, you’re never really getting better. You can’t outrun poor technique!

Over the weekend, we went to a play day, and it’s was so fun to see the really good riders out there running their horse. Their pattern looks like their horse is water just flowing through the course, it’s so steady, quick, and smooth. They just make it look easy.

Our position and ability to communicate to our horse really does affect the horse’s performance, and therefore YOUR timed and scored events . If you want a better time or a better score, learn how to be a more effective rider!

There are barrel racers and there are barrel racers. There are the kind that help their horses balance and there are the kind that don't. Good riders balance their horse to help them keep their center of balance centered in their body mass, not leaning outside of it. Riders do this by keeping their body mass and center of balance over their horse's center of balance.

The rider on the right is putting more weight in the outside stirrup, which helps the rider stay more upright and centered over the horse's body mass to maintain a more effective shared balance with their horse.

The horse's head position at right is aligned vertically with the rider's balance. This demonstrates the more effective shared balance between the horse and rider. Effective shared balance makes the turn easier for the horse, and it eliminates much of the horse's difficulty in transitioning to the upright position required to take off fast to the next barrel.

The left rider is a passenger aligned with their horse's lean into the turn. The rider is aligned more with the centrifugal force of the turn, which drives the horse outward from the line of the turn. It also intensifies the angle of the horse's lean in the turn, which can slow the horse's transition to an upright exit from the turn into the needed acceleration to the next barrel.

Note that the balanced horse on the right is already lifting their inside foreleg to begin accelerating to the next barrel while the left horse is struggling with their leaning in the turn. Look at the left rider's feet in the stirrups. The outside foot has almost no weight in the stirrup while the inside foot has almost all the rider's weight in the stirrup. This intensifies the horse's leaning in instead of limiting it for a better balance turn.

Riding in shared balance with your horse means you must bring your own good balance to the party in order to share it with your horse for a more effective ride. When a rider balances only by following the horse's balance, they are a passenger contributing nothing to the ride.

06/16/2025

Everything you do influences your horse, whether it’s in a positive or negative way is up to you.

06/15/2025

4-H Meeting Thursday, Horse show Friday night, Playday Saturday, and a Horse show tomorrow…. 😅😅

06/11/2025

Pretty sure I’m done working for the day 😳⚡️🌩️⛈️

06/09/2025

My daughter’s magic treehouse book knows what’s up. Those are some good rules right there. 🤗

06/08/2025

This must have felt good 😂

05/07/2025

Let’s go!

05/05/2025

YESSSSS! Disengaging the hindquarters has become over used as the problem solver for EVERYTHING!! It definitely has its place, however, it’s really just a SMALL piece of the puzzle.

💥 Not to mention a horse‘s pelvis doesn’t actually rotate as much as we think it does when we’re disengaging these hindquarters constantly, it can take a BIG toll on their hind end. Focusing on ENGAGING the hind end to build strength, muscle, and balance is often tossed to the wayside. But how many really know how to engage the hind end? I see many riders who have not learned how to engage the hind end or control the shoulders, use disengaging exercises because they’re not sure what else to do.
 💪 Let’s work on advancing out of some of the basic easy maneuvers and focus on Learning the harder stuff. 
🐴 So often in western riding the front end just get dumped to the ground in an effort to focus on the hind end. To have a well balanced Horse we need both!!!

Folks, it's completely true that advanced horsemanship and advanced maneuvers are mostly about the hind end moving correctly, with enough impulsion, and when and how you ask. This in no way means that the shoulder isn't important too.

This weekend was a 4 H horse camp that my son attended and I helped as an adult volunteer. The disengaging of the hindquarters is an epidemic. While this is a decent exercise for very young/green horses, it tends to get way over talked about and way over done.

If you are looking to stay safe on the ground and be able to do decent groundwork with your horse, it's WAY important that you can move the shoulder over. The only time you're going to get run over by a hip is if you have the horse tied and it can't get away. Darn near all ground wrecks involve you being pushed down and run over by the shoulder. Get the shoulder moving away from you as your main safety feature. Let's say that you have a horse that is continuously charging and pushing you with the shoulder. Disengaging them is like constantly re-pointing the muzzle of a gun at yourself. It makes it more dangerous, not less. Get the muzzle pushed away. That's the shoulder. Move the shoulder away. Please. If you're teaching a kid, teach them to move the shoulder away first. Please.

Disengaging the hindquarters is a small part of the puzzle on the way to engaging the hindquarters. Not all movement of the hindquarters is or should be disengagement. You don't actually want to ride a horse that is constantly disengaging the hindquarters. You can easily overdo disengaging and this is one of the most common problems we face today. Habituating this type of movement in your horse is a big mistake and it will take a lot of time to fix down the road. That time will be wasted and someone worked very hard to cause the problem, so, seriously, a few days of this when starting to ride or halter breaking is plenty 97% of the time. If you're doing this for months on end, you're making a big mistake. STOP.

This is also not a great thing for your horse physically. Lots of groin, HQ, and spine things out there result from the horse being disengaged 80,000 times. Chill out. Teach the kindergarteners their ABCs, but you're not going over the ABCs everyday in 7th grade, are you? Stop neglecting the shoulder. It's the actual thing that's going to get you hurt.

While I am up on this soapbox, keep in mind that "Whoa" doesn't mean stop forward motion, get your butt up out of the ground, shift all your weight to your front end, and turn 90 degrees. If you are disengaging their hindquarters, at the very least, please don't think you are teaching them to stop. You aren't. You're stopping them and then starting them to doing a few more things. That's not what "Whoa" means. If you picture a horse silhouette fully bucking, they are parking the front end and the hindquarters are quite free. Freeing up the hindquarters is NOT going to stop a horse from bucking. Whew! I feel better now!