Champion Horse Training Tip: Horse Show Practice Strategy

Horse Training Channel

23 Time World Champion Western Pleasure Horse Trainer Cleve Wells teaches us an important strategy to keep in mind as we are training at home and in the warm up pen that if you put to use today, should bring you closer to reaching your goals with your horse. Really listen and let this common sense strategy sink in…

Here’s the transcript:
“…..just brush just like a paint brush, just brush that leg, and see she moves over and moves around off of it.

So what I am wanting to do is in this part of the lesson is not going to be like practice pretty, it’s going to be practice for efficiency and I don’t want everything all the time exactly what I want when I show. Because anybody that shows horses knows that nothing gives 100% in the show pen.

Nothing gives in the show pen as much as they give in the warm up pen (you know 90% of our horses) so you are going to have to get a little bit more. And I want to get a little bit more flex, and a little bit more bend in my horse just to know I can, so I don’t have to ask for everything that my horse has to give when I show.

If I ask for more flex and more bend in the warm up pen and in the practice pen sometimes then when I ask for 25% of that when I show, it makes my horse a lot happier. My horse doesn’t feel like they are having to exert themselves quite so hard mentally and physically in order to show.

It is when that horse has to be 100% to show is when you have a problem.

Because what happens is people they try to practice exactly like they want to show and the horse in order to participate has to be every bit as good in a strange environment as they do at home and thats just not going to happen.”

End of transcript

This short show horse training clip is taken from an online Western Pleasure clinic with Western Pleasure All Star Cleve Wells featured on the HorseTrainingChannel.com. Who better to learn from than World Champions who have been there and know what it takes to make a solid broke horse?