How to Hold a Horse's Reins for Trotting or Jogging

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kelli on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you some tips and techniques that I use when I'm trotting and jogging my horse. So there is 2 ways that you can hold your reins when your ride. Whether you are riding English or your riding western horse it is going to snap a little bit. Some of your younger western horse we would ride and a snaffle bit verses the shank bit which Covey has in his mouth. You can see that it has the longer shanks on each side that the bit is attached to. So what we are going to do we want to ride 2 handed. First of all you want to make sure your reins are nice and even. You are going to hold your rein between your pinkie and you are going to have your thumb on top. So your grip is going to look somewhat like this. It is kind of a fist with the rein in between the pinkie and the thumb is pointing upward. So when you hold your reins, your hand is going to be upward like that. Your thumb is going to be pointing up and make sure you are holding your reins evenly. You don't want to be holding them kind of loosely in your hand. You don't want to be gripping on them, holding on for dear life cause that it just transcends down to the bit. It is going to make your horse really ridged. So you just want to have a nice double grip on the reins. Not to loose where your fingers are open but you want to hold them just nice and soft and nice and simple. If you want to hold your reins one handed which is more western style, which is more appropriate for the type of bit that we have in her mouth. What you want to do first of all you want to make sure that you are starting with the reins that are even to begin with, the same length. So what we are going to do is pull the reins this way and make sure we have them even both sides. We are going to run our hand down and we are going to hold them one handed. Whether you ride right or left handed, it is really up to you whatever hand you are more comfortable with. Obviously if your a left handed person, you are probably going to be more comfortable riding with your left hand. So we are going to hold our reins together like that, we are going to hold them in our fingers like this and we are going to have our thumb on top. So instead of having up like this, we are going to have our thumb pointing more downwards. Now for steering to try to take control, we may pick up a little bit more so we have a little bit more contact on the horses mouth. But if we are just holding them loosely, we are going to have our thumb pointed and downward motion. So that is how you would want to hold your reins one handed and 2 handed."