Hello everyone. I'm Amelia! Today we are talking about
your reins and everything to do with your reins, as far as how to shorten your reins,
how to hold your reins, and how to keep your reins from slipping out of your hands.
At the end I'm gonna give you like a really special trick that I want you guys to try out.
So let me know in the comments below if you have trouble with letting your reins get longer because
I noticed this happens a lot to my students, where like they shorten up their reins and then
all of a sudden the reins get longer and then I have to tell them to shorten their reins again
and it's important that you have you want to establish a steady contact with your horse so
that you can control your horse and it's really important that you hold your reins correctly,
you use your reins correctly and that you're aware of your rein length because when you're constantly
changing the rein length and letting the reins get super long and then shortening them up and
super long and shortening them up then you're not able to establish a steady contact and have a nice
connection with your horse and that's going to make it difficult to keep them round to turn them
just to really communicate with them. So the first thing that we're going to
talk about is how to correctly hold the reins in your hand so I'm going to turn sideways here
and when you hold the reins in your hand you want to hold the reins so that they go come out
between your ring finger and your pinky finger. This is important because this allows a lot of
sensitivity in your hand so that you can like do small movements with your wrist and your ring
finger to supple your horse. So this is how you hold your reins it's also really important that
your thumb that you make a rooftop shape with your thumb. So you can see how my thumb is bent
here and then with my thumb I'm pushing down on my pointer finger to keep the reins from slipping
so that's super important that you have a little pressure there between your thumb
and your pointer finger so that the reins don't slip out. I used to ride like this with hitchhiker
thumbs and that's incorrect because if you ride like this with hitchhiker thumbs then it creates
a lot of tension in your hand and your hand is really tight so you're not able to properly stuff
like if you're just sitting if you're watching this sitting at your computer just try that if
you're if your thumbs are out like this it's kind of impossible to supple your horse and that
you'll feel a lot of tension in your forearm and your wrist so you want to have the rooftop shape
with your thumb your rain coming out between your pinky finger and your ring finger so that you can
then supple your horse like if i'm here and i want to stop on my horse i'm gonna see how i just
slightly move the bit a little bit and he dropped his head nicely down in it let me just show you a
little bit while i'm walking if you like my videos give this video a thumbs up if you've already
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resources that i have like a free rider position mini course a free course on confidence so i'm
just so grateful to this community and to all of you guys for being here okay so while i'm walking
around here i'm just focusing on my hand position so i have that little rooftop shape with my thumb
i'm pointing down and pressing between my thumb and my pointer finger and then because
of this correct position i'm able to just do a little bit of movement through my wrist so
when i want to supple my horse and get my horse to be a little bit rounder
what i do is that i use my inside leg to push my horse into the outside rain and then with my
inside wrist i'm just kind of bending and moving my fingers on the inside rain to get him to supple
so you can see like for example if his head's up first thing i do is i give him a little kick with
my inside leg move him into my outside reign and then with the fingers on the inside rain
i'm doing a scrambling eggs motion so you know how like when you're scrambling eggs in the
morning you're holding the bowl in one hand and with the other hand you're whisking your eggs
it's a little bit that motion to supple your horse so if i'm gonna supple him i'm thinking like
a little wiggle wiggle soft wiggle wiggle soft you don't want to be scrambling eggs constantly
because that's just gonna annoy your horse but you want to just supple supple soft supple supple soft
now if i want to shorten my rain so if i'm like going let's say from a free walk
which is a walk on a loose or a long rain and i'm going to shorten up my reins so the first thing
that i'm going to do is i always shorten my inside rain first so what you have to do is
that one rain has to help the other so i'm going to put both my reins in my outside hand here
i'm going to then slide down my inside rain and take contact now i need to shorten the
outside range so i'm going to put both reins in my inside hand and slide down the outside hand
so you need to do a lot of practicing lengthening and shortening your reins until it becomes
really really natural so i'll do that again i'll just like let the reins out
let him go to the freewalk and then i'm gonna to shorten up the reins put both reins in my outside
hand slide down the inside put both rings in the inside hand slide down the outside so notice that
when i shortened up my reins i didn't change my seat or my position this is what i see happening a
lot of times is people go and they're like on the loose rein right and they're gonna shorten their
reins off and like people will literally like do this like they'll like lean forward and go like
this to get their rein short so that's like really a bad thing to do it's really important that
you keep your seat and your legs connected because remember that rhythm is the base of the training
scale and so i'm really mindful of my horse's walk rhythm and the tempo and if i shorten up my reins
i'm going to do it like little by little there so that now i've got my rain shorter
and he's walking on the contact so it's really important that you have
control over your rain length that you have this correct hand position so that
you can just get your horse on the bit you can steer your horse you can have control of your
horse don't do that and you could see there he was just a little bit pulling on me so i
again i just kind of moving the bit until he gets soft good boy so um i i do a lot of like
online trainings with students and so i have this one online student she said that she went
to a clinic and she struggles with keeping her hands closed in her rain short and the instructor
had her ride with little rocks in her hands so i have here in my pocket i found a few little rocks
in the in the dirt on the way up to the arena and i'm gonna give this a try so basically i
just have like two little small um rocks she said not that you don't want them to be too big
and i'm gonna hold these in the palm of my hands while i ride around so i'm gonna let you know
my experience with this i think that the the reason that this is a good thing to play around
with is because for one it's just that awareness like if you are someone that all the time your
your reins end up sliding out of your hands think about kind of you don't want to be like gripping
these rocks to death but basically my pinky finger is keeping them from falling out of my hand
and i'm just gonna see here what i'm feeling so definitely i'm feeling more
awareness that you know i'm keeping a steady contact i'm keeping my rain short
and then i'm just kind of able to still supple so that's the main thing is you even if you're
like holding these little rocks you still want to feel like you're able to move your wrist and
ring finger and supple a little bit your horse um but yeah give this a try maybe try if you
have trouble with the rein slipping try this holding the rocks in your hands and still
you want to make sure that you have that correct position with a little bit of a bend in your thumb
that you're still able to move your wrist and ring finger and keep your horse supple in the contact
so it's definitely like an interesting feel to try to ride and have these rocks in my hand
um but again just anything that you can do to kind of bring awareness to
your hands and to keeping a little bit of a steadier contact will go a long way to
communicating better with your horse to getting your horse a little bit rounder
and another thing that i didn't mention before that i should have mentioned
is that you always want to have a straight line from your elbow to your horse's mouth so
like when i'm riding here you can see there's a straight line from my elbow to my horse's mouth
if your hands are like this locked out and that's going to make your arms really stiff
you can see how there's no longer a straight line from my elbow to the horse's mouth and you also
don't want to have your hands too high again that creates a broken line so good boy Phargo
good boy so give this a try try holding some little rocks in your hands if you have trouble
with your rein slipping out and let me know in the comments below if this video was helpful
or if there's any other tips that you'd like to share with our community to help keep your
rein short and hold your range properly so thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video