Backing Up a Horse in Rodeo Barrel Racing

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Holly Heidemann and on behalf of Expert Village, today I'm going to show you a maneuver called backing a horse up and it's very important to the sport of barrel racing to learn or help a horse get its hip underneath themselves in the pattern. So while you don't back up in a barrel racing pattern, this is essential in your horsemanship skills to be able to get a horse to get their hip right underneath them so they can complete that turn. So I'm going to show you what I'm going to do. I'm going to sit deeply in my saddle, down and back. I'm going to gather my horse's reins and I'm going to swing my feet slightly forward. The other thing you can do if a horse is not wanting to back up, is you can tap your feet against their sides a little bit which I, I may demonstrate, we'll see how this horse responds. But I'm going to sit down and back, I'm going to squeeze and say "Back". And my horse should back up underneath me. I'm doing it quite slowly so that the camera can follow me, but what you want to do is just keep that horse in movement. There shouldn't be any stickiness; there should not be any place where they're going to resist. If there were, that's when my feet would get in motion like right here. I'm just going to ask him with my toes to accelerate and he'll go back into that back up. "Whoa.""