BARREL HORSES… LEAD DEPARTURES… HORSES FALLING.
Hi – Larry Trocha here.
Welcome to another “Horse Training Tips Insider“. Today I'm going to answer several questions sent in by one of
my subscribers.
I answered the questions via audio and I go into quite a bit of
detail so it's pretty long… around 20 minutes.
It's well worth listening to because you'll discover some horse
training concepts that are seldom revealed.
Below, I've posted the email the subscriber sent me.
Hi Larry,
I have a followup question to your newsletter on lead departures.
My daughter has a 10 year old barrel horse. At the beginning of a run, she walks him to the gate and moves his hip to the right, kisses to him and asks for a lead departure. When he lopes off in a slow lope, he picks up the correct lead 100% of the time. However, he knows when we are at a race, so instead of just stepping into a slow lope and then accelerating, he takes off like a rocket in the wrong lead. When he takes off like this he gets in the wrong lead almost everytime.
Before the last race, I had my daughter run a couple time only's. When he took off, I had her set him in the ground and roll him back a couple times. This seemed to help him wait for her to ask for speed, so he was in the correct lead. She made a nice smoth run. Am I on the right track? Is this a long term fix? What would you do different?
Also, I've watch every NFR barrel run on youtube many times in slow motion and I have never seen any of them move the horses hip over for a lead departure to get in the correct lead. I've also never seen anyone else do it at any of the races we go to, and we go every weekend 10 months out of the year. Am I going about this all wrong to begin with?
Thanks so much for your help.
L P