DVD review: Controlling your Horses Speed

John Lyons DVD on Controlling your Horses Speed is like 2 years of horsemanship clinics compressed into an hour and forty-five minutes. If your horse is having problems with going faster or slower, you should check it out. He works with a western style of riding so his goal is speed control on a loose rein, but it's the rein-awareness that he is focused on. You don't use leg control other than as a way to speed up your pony in the exercises he teaches here.

The principle exercise is serpentines. Change directions, move the hindquarters, soften the nose, drop the head, relax the neck muscles, move the shoulder with the indirect rein, keep the nose down through direction changes are the steps along the serpentine trail to control. He starts off in the walk, but most of the real work is done at the trot, which he promises will smooth out after the first hour of serpentine work. Yes, plan a hour of sitting trotting to start out with! You will be glad you got it done.

Endless serpentines.... he says he works with four facets of each exercise: 1) the motivation or pressure to get the horse to perform; 2) the body part he wants to affect; 3) the direction he wants the body part to move in; and 4) the reward or release for the movement. By the time he was speeding and slowing his horse, Charlie, through those endless serpentines, I was wondering what the reward was for ol' Charlie. The final stages seemed so relentless! Perhaps if you are a horse a few seconds of loose reins between the requests is sufficient reward, but maybe not for a long-eared critter.

Since Cracker Joe would not be a happy hinny under John's direction, we changed it up and tried it out with a more positive spin. The reward was a horse cookie and the criteria kept moving up the Lyon list: change directions, move the hindquarters, soften the nose, drop the head, relax the neck muscles, move the shoulder with the indirect rein, keep the nose down. Thirty minutes into it and we still had a happy hinny with a softly yielding nose riding well with only his loping halter. Tomorrow we'll see about dropping the head and the rest of the criteria. I used a variable schedule for reinforcement after he got the idea. Based on trying it out like that, I would now recommend serpentines as a good exercise for doing a bunch of stuff and this DVD will give you a pretty good idea of why and how to get it done.

But, I would actually NOT want my horses to move like a Lyons trained animal. The neck is too low on the demonstration horses shown in the DVD. It looks too much like some wacky show ring style where the horse has given up taking an interest in the rest of the world. It's just a style thing, right? If, in the end, your critter moves at the speed you desire, the world will be a safer place.