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Establish ‘cuing zones’ for your legs

David — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:15:09 +0000

Next in a series
We continue our look at the fundamental riding skill of using your legs. In the last installment, we looked at forms of leg contact and also leg position.

If you’re going to be effective in controlling the horse’s body parts individually, you’re going to need to refine your cues as much as possible. One way that we do that is by having specific zones on the horse’s belly for your leg cues.

Forward position “A” to move shoulder.

The forward position, just behind the horse’s cinch, will be what you will use to move his shoulders. Applying leg pressure in the middle of his belly will be the cue for him to move his ribcage over or change the overall alignment of his spine, and applying pressure at the back of his belly, near the back cinch, will be the cue for him to move his hips. The more consistent you are with these cues, the quicker your horse will start to respond to them. If you aren’t used to using your legs in these specific zones, try to make yourself more aware where you are putting your leg when you apply pressure.

When you use your legs in these positions, you want to imagine that the energy you create goes straight through the horse. If you push in the hip position, you only want the hip to move, the same with the rib and shoulder position.

Middle position 'B' to move ribs or whole horse.

A common error we see is when a rider gives the horse the cue to move his hip, but instead the energy comes out the shoulder! We’ll spend more time reviewing this when we work on hip control, but keep it in mind anytime you’re using your leg.

Back position 'C' to move hips.

Also when you use one leg to move the horse over, make sure that you “open up” the other one. Opening up your leg means that you take your leg away from the horse. With a lot of the body control moves, it should seem like there is an imaginary broomstick under your horse, so that when you bump him with one leg, the other leg moves away automatically; it “opens up” the door so to speak, so the horse has somewhere to go.

Editor’s Note: More with Les is a regular California Horsetrader column. Les Vogt has won more than 15 World Championships, including two wins at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Although Les still rides and occasionally shows, his focus is giving clinics around the world and developing products for the performance horseman. To learn more about Les and to see his clinic schedule, visit the Web site: www.lesvogt.com

Riding Skills: Handling your reins

David — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:30:13 +0000

I’m often asked: “When I use my legs, should I be kicking or holding them steady?” Well, just as we’ve talked about how you shouldn’t use steady pressure with your reins, I’m not a big believer in steady pressure with your legs either. A large percentage of the time, I’m going to have you bump the horse’s sides with your calves, or what I call your “boot tops.” To use your boot tops, you’ll turn your knee out so your calves can make contact with the horse’s side and then just bump your legs against him.

Learning to bump with your boot tops is going to make a huge difference in how your horse responds to you and how fast he learns. As an example, imagine you were talking with some friends and someone else walks up to get your attention. If he just lays his hand on your shoulder, you would feel it, but you might just keep going with your conversation; but on the other hand, if he comes up and starts poking you in the arm, you’ll probably pay attention. Using your leg on the horse is very similar. If you’re used to using your calf and pressing on the horse’s side, and he ignores you, where do you go? You’re going to have to press even harder or put on a pair of spurs to make your point. On the other hand, if you are bumping him with your boot tops, your cues are going to be a lot harder for him to ignore.

Another advantage of bumping with your boot tops is it will help you stay balanced and relaxed in the saddle. Any time you’re squeezing with your leg, you will probably be bracing with another part of your body to keep yourself balanced. When you’re riding, you always want to stay loose and relaxed, never stiff. If there is no response to that, I can push my toe up and plant the spur on my horse’s side – then as I push my toe down the spur will roll up against his belly. When your foot is in the stirrup, the stirrup becomes a fulcrum to help you turn your toe up or down and allows you to use your spur for a controlled “roll” against your horse. It makes him pay attention.

As far as stabbing a horse with the spur, I think those days are gone; we don’t see that much anymore. And one of the main reasons is that it makes the horse tense up. When he sees your foot come out to the side as if you’re going to gouge him, he holds his breath and his neck gets stiff, so there goes my performance. So it’s boot tops first, then make contact with the rowel of your spur, and then roll it up if you need to. As a horse gets further along I’ll just lay my leg on him first, then bump with my boot tops and so on. You always want to give him a chance to respond to the lightest cue – that’s how you get him light!

Next issue: “Cuing zones for your legs”

Editor’s Note: More with Les is a regular California Horsetrader column. Les Vogt has won more than 15 World Championships, including two wins at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Although Les still rides and occasionally shows, his focus is giving clinics around the world and developing products for the performance horseman. To learn more about Les and to see his clinic schedule, visit the Web site: www.lesvogt.com

Riding skills: Sitting In The Saddle

David — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:30:05 +0000

To be effective with your leg cues, you need to be straddling your horse with your weight resting on the bottom of your hip bones. You also want to get to where you can stay balanced in the saddle no matter where your leg is on the horse. As we’ll discuss later, you’re going to need to move your lower leg from the spot just behind the horse’s elbow, to move his shoulder, to a position way back on his barrel, the cue to move his hip. So if you feel like you need to use your legs or the stirrups on a regular basis for balance, you’ve got a long way to go before you have the freedom to use them to effectively cue your horse. Keep just enough weight in your stirrups to keep from losing them.

Making contact with the spur.
Also, if you’re clamping with your knees, you’re liable to vault out of the saddle if your horse stops, just let your legs hang when you’re not using them and keep them relaxed. You’re also going to want to sit back on your back pockets.

There’s an old saying, and a good one: “If we can see the “W” on your Wranglers, you’re riding bad.” If you lean forward, and your shoulders get in front of your hips, you could be in big trouble if your horse makes a quick lateral move. In all the years I’ve ridden, I’ve very seldom seen someone fall off a horse backward! They usually fall forward, either when the horse stops or stumbles, or they fall to the side when a horse snaps out from underneath them. Since hard stops and fast turns are what we’re working toward, you’d better work on keeping those shoulders back now so you’re ready for the fun stuff when your horse is!

Relaxed leg.
Foot Position
Maybe it’s from riding so many cow horses, but I’m really more comfortable with my foot all the way in the stirrup, rather than keeping it under the ball of my foot as many riders do. All and all, it’s a matter of where you feel most comfortable and where you’ll have the most capacity of movement with your leg – without losing the stirrup. Also, I don’t worry about keeping my heel down; you just want your leg to be relaxed, comfortable and maneuverable. You sure don’t want your heel up, but don’t worry about pushing it down either, it will put too much weight in your feet.

Stirrup Length
Again, this is a matter of what feels best to you, but I’m finding that I’m leaning more and more toward a shorter stirrup. Pick the place where your leg is both comfortable and maneuverable.

Using the boot top.
Using Your Legs
I’m often asked: “When I use my legs, should I be kicking or holding them steady?” Well, just as we’ve talked about how you shouldn’t use steady pressure with your reins, I’m not a big believer in steady pressure with your legs either. A large percentage of the time, I’m going to have you bump the horse’s sides with your calves, or what I call your “boot tops.” To use your boot tops, you’ll turn your knee out so your calves can make contact with the horse’s side and then just bump your legs against him.

We’ll resume our look at using your legs in the next issue.

First Step: Training Your Hands

David — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:45:12 +0000

Responsive Hands Create a Responsive Mouth
Have you ever ridden a horse that was so responsive to the reins, it could have been made from silk threads and never broken? If you follow the basic strategies I’m going to lay out, you should be able to create that level of responsiveness in your horse with time and practice.

So where do you start? With yourself! Until you’re trained, how do you think you could train a horse?

Here are the first two secrets:
1. Make your horse think he’s a hero. Learn to really look for positive gestures from your horse, and make sure he knows when he’s “done good!”

2. Learn to make your corrections effective.
Always start your cues as if you were riding with those silk reins. If the horse doesn’t respond to light pressure then start moving your hands until you get a response.

Here, I’m just making contact with the bit. To release pressure, I can relax my fingers and move my hands forward.
Key Point
If your horse isn’t giving lightly from side to side, one rein at a time, don’t think you’re going to have much luck asking for vertical flexion. Get him soft one rein at a time before you ask him to respond to both of them at once.

If you’re asking for vertical flexion, that is for your horse to round his spine toward your direct rein (with his ears staying relatively level), and you feel any resistance, gently start to work the rein by moving just your fingers. Never take the rein up quickly, but always do it smoothly so that nothing causes any pain or fear in your horse. You want to keep him relaxed.

If you’re asking for lateral flexion, that is for the horse to round his neck and drop his chin, and you feel some resistance—work your hands, and the bit, back and forth in his mouth to break the resistance.

Critical Components
1. Always start softly and work your way up if the resistance continues.

2. As soon as your horse starts to give to your hands, just a gesture—release the pressure, giving him lots of slack.

Hands in the box. This is the area that I consider my neutral zone. Slack in the rein and hands right above the horse’s neck.
You’re Not Forcing, You’re Training
Face it, your horse probably doesn’t like you moving a big piece of metal around in his mouth. So if he does what you ask, you release the pressure—that’s his reward, you’ve made him happy.

If he doesn’t do what you want right away, you create a situation that is not comfortable, yet not painful. You want him wish that you would stop that, yet not panic about it.

The first time or two, he’s likely to do the right thing by mistake, just sort of stumble into it, and that’s all the more reason why you need to be extra fast with your release. What better thing than to have your horse figure out that something in his power will make you happy. He’ll start searching for that thing, and what could be better than that!

Lastly: Keep Life in Your Hands
What I mean by this is that you never want to just hold on to the bit with steady “dead” pressure.

1. If you pick up the reins and you get what you want—release.

2. If you pick up the reins and you don’t get what you want, start working your reins in one way or another to get the response you want.

Editor’s Note: More with Les is a regular California Horsetrader column. Les Vogt has won more than 15 World Championships, including two wins at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Although Les still rides and occasionally shows, his focus is giving clinics around the world and developing products for the performance horseman. To learn more about Les and to see his clinic schedule, visit the Web site:

Exercise No. 5: You will back your horse in a circle, with his spine matching the circumference of the circle. You need to control every part of your horse’s body to make this work, so it's a great test to see if all the parts are functioning correctly.
The great part about these exercises is not only is the horse learning, but you’re learning to be a more effective and subtle rider too. And as you practice your reactions and cues will start coming so naturally you won’t even have to think about them. When you can do all five fluidly in sequence, you’ll know you’ve really accomplished something!

As you start to do this exercise, don’t forget to watch your horse’s poll. If you can’t keep it soft and supple while you do Exercise No. 5–ABORT! You need to backtrack to your basics and start again. If you try to do any of the exercises while the horse is resisting, you can actually be harming your program. You need to be training yourself and the horse to keep his poll soft and supple in everything you do.

Exercise No. 5 allows you to find out if the zones work together. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, if they don’t you have to fix it. It also develops muscles, tendons, and ligaments for stopping on one side at a time.

The Zones of Our Horse: You’ll hear me speak about our horse’s zones and the zones correspond to the part of the body that the exercise controls. Exercise No. 1 controls zone 1; exercise No. 2 controls zone 2, and so forth.
When you have control of all four zones, especially the head and neck, you can use this maneuver to take any tension out of the horse. How much should you use this? 20-30 times a day is not unreasonable. If you’re getting stuck, identify the problem part and then work on it by itself, then sneak back into Exercise No. 5. Remember that horses don’t have egos; they love understanding what you want and being rewarded.

This issue’s column concludes the on-going topic about “The Five Easy Pieces.” Next time, we’ll start a new topic. If you missed any of the previous articles, or want to refresh your memory, you can read previous More with Les columns at the Web site: http://news.horsetrader.com

Editor’s Note: More with Les is a regular California Horsetrader column. Les Vogt has won more than 15 World Championships, including two wins at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Although Les still rides and occasionally shows, his focus is giving clinics around the world and developing products for the performance horseman. To learn more about Les and to see his clinic schedule, visit the Web site: www.lesvogt.com

The Five Easy Pieces: Exercises to take control of your horse’s body zones

David — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:20:43 +0000

Continuing in a Series
This time, we introduce the topic of Exercise No. 5: How this fits into the program. In the next few installments, Les Vogt takes you through exercises of his Five Easy Pieces. When you’ve mastered them, you should be able to put any part of your horse’s body where you want it, without resistance.

Exercise No. 5: How this fits into the program
When you can do Exercise No. 5 with ease, you’re going to have achieved control of every part of your horse, and that means you have the tools to both create good maneuvers and to fix faulty ones.

Also, once you can do maneuver No. 5 in a serpentine pattern, you really have the skills and control you need to do a lead change, you’re just doing it in reverse. There are several other exercises we’ll work on before we’re ready to change leads, but they will all build on and reinforce the skills that you have learned as you’ve mastered these five exercises. Congratulations!

Exercise No. 5: You will back your horse in a circle, with his spine matching the circumference of the circle. You need to control every part of your horse’s body to make this work, so it's a great test to see if all the parts are functioning correctly.
Developing hip control through backing
By now, your horse should be backing fluidly, and it’s time to maneuver him around a little while he’s doing it, and that’s what Exercise No. 5 is all about. In Exercise No. 5, you will back your horse in a circle, with his spine matching the circumference of the circle. You need to be able to control every part of the horse’s body to make this work, so it’s a great test to see if all the parts are functioning correctly. I probably do it with every horse I ride every day.

If you’re having problems at this when you first start, it probably means you need to spend more time on Exercise No. 4 first. Remember: To try to get through these exercises too fast will only catch up to you later when you don’t get the response you want from your horse and you have to return to the basics. Get each exercise down cold before you move on. And any time you encounter a problem with a new exercise, go back to the last one to tune up your skills, and then try again.

There’s a lot to think about when you’re doing this, so make sure that you don’t concentrate so hard that you get mechanical with your cues. It may take some practice, but once you have mastered it, you have also mastered the same cues and body position you will need for counter canter and the lead change—that is, holding the shoulder out of the way while you move the hip.

Lead changes in reverse
When you can do Exercise No. 5 both directions fairly fluidly, try backing in a figure eight, and then move on to a serpentine. Remember to hold the shoulder out and push the hip in. Keep practicing this drill every time you ride.

First, if the horse freezes up anywhere it means one of his body parts needs to be loosened up again. Go work on that and then come back to the circle back. Second, the better you get at the sequence of cues you need to back the figure eight—hold the shoulder, move the hip—the easier the lead changes will come to you in the future, so you just can’t spend too much time here.

Next time, we’ll finish up this ongoing topic series and discuss: Putting The Five Easy Pieces Together.

Editor’s Note: More with Les is a regular California Horsetrader column. Les Vogt has won more than 15 World Championships, including two wins at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Although Les still rides and occasionally shows, his focus is giving clinics around the world and developing products for the performance horseman. To learn more about Les and to see his clinic schedule, visit the Web site: www.lesvogt.com

The Five Easy Pieces: Exercises to take control of your horse’s body zones

David — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:20:04 +0000

Continuing in a Series
This time, we continue discussing the topic of Exercise No. 4: Hip Control relating to “backing.” In the next few installments, Les Vogt takes you through exercises of his Five Easy Pieces. When you’ve mastered them, you should be able to put any part of your horse’s body where you want it, without resistance.

The goal of backing
Your goal when you back is not to have to pull back hard on the horse’s mouth to get him to move backward, but to be able to use just enough contact with the bit to tell him not to go forward–kind of like shifting him into reverse–and then using your legs, like the gas, to move backward.

Yes, you might have to tug a little to get him started, but your goal is to take it from an active rein cue to an active leg cue as soon as possible.

Your end goal is to be able to “put him in reverse” with a light pick up of the reins, and then go to your legs to add the impulsion that sends him back.
Timing is important
The timing of your command and correction, if it’s needed is really important as well. You can’t say “whoa,” and correct at the same time. You have to say “whoa,” wait for him to try, and then correct him if he doesn’t stop. In order for the horse to learn, you have to give him a chance to do it right. When he does give you an effort, make sure he knows it was the right one.

He just made his first move toward a great sliding stop! Nothing you see in a reining class is done overnight; it’s done through years of consistent training, but the hardest part can be the consistency.

To achieve that, you’ll want to start by picking up the reins and lightly asking the horse to come back. If he doesn’t, you’ll want to bring your hands back a little stronger and alternately squeeze with your hands if you need to so you’re not giving him pressure he can just lean against–especially if he should start to lift his head.

Bump a little with your legs
In addition, you should bump a little with your legs so you’re revving the engine and only giving him one way to release the pressure. As soon as he takes a backward step, release and praise him. Continue with this approach, starting with a light hand but always using your leg too.

Then add a little more pressure with your hands until he starts to come back. Be patient. You don’t need to get this in a day, and you do want to encourage your horse to stay relaxed. Stay at it, and he’ll get the hang of it. As you progress, you’ll start getting more steps, and you won’t have to be nearly as assertive to get him going.

Next time, we’ll start discussing Exercise No. 5: How This Fits into the Program.

Editor’s Note: More with Les is a regular California Horsetrader column. Les Vogt has won more than 15 World Championships, including two wins at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Although Les still rides and occasionally shows, his focus is giving clinics around the world and developing products for the performance horseman. To learn more about Les and to see his clinic schedule, visit the Web site: www.lesvogt.com