Reining & Barrel Racing Guide [img heavy!]
Sept 21, 2019 6:00:31 GMT -5
Ryder ☆ and Jewellz like this
Post by Aragorn on Sept 21, 2019 6:00:31 GMT -5
REINING & BARREL RACING TRAINING GUIDE
This guide will show you, how to pose your horse for reining and barrel racing competitions. That will focus only on achieving proper poses, not on judging system. Choose your horse and let’s get started!Each part of this tutorial will be posted in separated replies, because there's a lot of info!
#1 CANTERS AND GALLOPS
Both in Reining and Barrel racing you will need some nice canter or gallop pictures. You can see difference beetwen these two gaits here, in Neco guide: seeingstars.boards.net/thread/1896/gaiting-guide. In Reining we need one canter or gallop, in barrel racing we need two gallop pictures - one facing right, one left. Now go to the Playpen and make the area full screen - that will give your horse more space, so he/she can run freely! Put a toy right in front of your horse and lead him from one end of playpen to another. Your pony should look at toy and follow it, you can throw it to gain their focus… When you see, that your horse begin to trot, hold spacebar till end of gallop! You can achieve even some additional gaits this way! What if that method doesn’t work out really well? You can change your horse energy to 100% and fullness to 10-20% in brainsliders. Then pickup leftovers plate, give your horse moment to eat a bit (that will make him less excited and scary!) and then pickup the plate and lead your horse through playpen.
This is perfect canter example - hoove touchs ground in nice, straight line (which means canter is leveled!), body shading, ears are aligned. Look also on expression - horse looks calm, focused on object in front of him.
You can learn more about expression here: seeingstars.site/dressage.html
Two examples of poor aligment in Game’s canter.
- Look at right, hind hoof on first photo - it’s unleveled, his rump is lighter than rest of the body and he’s looking down.
- At first sight, this one looks nice. But details show us, that this canter isn’t properly aligned - there’s big space beetwen two front legs, and the body is slightly darker on rear side. You can also compare hind right hoof aligment to this on perfect example higher.
Cahokia Sky is showing us, how proper gallop should looks like - he’s looking forward, calm and focused. His whole body is evenly shaded and his legs are collected together. Ears are perfectly aligned.
Arathea presents gallop. You can see, that her aligment is really nice - shading on the body is even, ears are aligned and legs are nicely collected… But her expression aren’t best - she looks sleepy, because her eyelids cover big part of iris.
Caddy was catched in good moment, when legs were fully extended - but the aligment is pretty poor. You can see his second ear and legs are much brighter than rest of body.
In my opinion it’s easier to achieve nice, impressing canter than really aligned gallop - but you can keep trying!