07/17/2025
How much outside rein?
(Prerequisites for “Inside-leg-to-outside-rein connection”)
Before we connect a horse into the outside rein, we need the horse to readily flow away from the inside leg.
If the horse doesn’t bend through the rib cage and step under and across from JUST the inside aids, they ARE NOT READY to be connected into the outside rein!
The horse below is clearly not balanced. She is STARTING to learn to soften off the inside aids, but she’s also rushing and leaning. I would want to see this more solid before using much of any outside rein.
People create major resistances by combining the aids, before the horse understands them individually.  We would not ask a child to spell and write sentences when they are still learning the alphabet. That would absolutely frustrate them, and they would most likely have a meltdown! Yet all too often people try to ride green horses, the way they would expect to ride an advanced one, with the same combination of aids.
Once a horse can emotionally regulate and stay at a regular tempo, and demonstrate at least some kind of bend, we can start thinking about adding outside rein.
Inside leg to outside rein connection is all about getting the energy to flow through the horse’s body diagonally, and then catching and guiding it with the outside hand. If the energy isn’t flowing from the horses inside hind leg towards the outside shoulder (or if they are really advanced, the outside ear) then there is nothing to catch, recycle, or guide with the outside rein.
Also, it’s not like one day, your horses ready and then forevermore you connect with the outside rein. It ebbs and flows moment to moment!!  For example, if you try to start a leg yield or shoulder in, and your horse is not quite ready for it, or is distracted, or a little tense, you may open or loosen the outside rein for a few steps, to get the shoulder to start to go a little sideways, and then once the energy is going in the general correct direction, you reapply the outside rein to get a quality movement.  Or maybe you are circling left on your horse, starts to drift right to join his buddy or head to the gate! In that moment you might lock down your outside rein, but you certainly don’t wanna live like that!
The real irony is that take some outside rein to get a horse to really go sideways correctly, but yet we want to be able to go a little sideways as a prerequisite for utilizing the outside rein. 🫣 I bring this up because people who have started young horses and brought them up through the level of doing nice lateral work, absolutely understand exactly what I mean! There is a big difference between getting a horse to just sort of flow the direction that you want, and to get the energy to move through their body diagonally, versus doing “real” lateral movements! Don’t let the fear of doing lateral movements “wrong” keep you from getting your horse supple and soft and moving diagonally through a bendy body!
