Tag: lyons legacy

You know, the greatest thing about bits is they’re tools. They’re great tools, but they don’t train a horse. If it did, you would go to the tack store and buy the ones that said stop bucking and stop rearing and 10 foot slide here and 30 foot slide there but they don’t. They’re great tools to use and the more tools in the toolbox I have then the easier the job becomes. What I’ve learned is everybody was always taught that their hands aren’t good enough to go to a shank. I can tell you this, you put that person in the snaffle bit, they’re comfortable and they pull and jerk and pull cause they’re comfortable with that bit. Put that person with heavy hands in a shank. They will grab that one time and they will not touch it again and they figure out real quick I better get a little softer. The snaffle bit is the only bit that you really ever need. I can train everything in the snaffle bit. I can try to do everything I need in that snaffle bit but it’s also not the only bit I want. There are other bits that do other tools or other things that I like and things I can use like going to the split reins and tracking one-handed, and being able to narrow that road up and teach that horse to stay between those reins. It’s a cool thing you know, but absolutely the bit is not severe, it’s how you use it. If we start figuring out what I don’t wanna do is touch the horse, I want that bit to stay in the center, I don’t wanna touch them. My goal is not to touch that horse. The only time I touch him is when he makes a mistake and he’s telling me how much pressure I need to put on this horse. We think that we decide the pressure, we don’t decide the pressure, that horse decides the pressure. That horse says it takes this amount of pressure to make me do this. We don’t decide, that horse decides. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t put any pressure on them, I wouldn’t touch them. But it’s not my choice, it’s that horses choice. The nice thing about horses is the better trained they get and the more they learn. the less I have to ever touch this horse. When I’m showing reining horses, the idea is 80% of the time this horse drives, I don’t touch them. I don’t ever have to touch that horse for 80% of that ride. I want him to drive, not me, and that’s when I’m ready to show this horse. Bits are tools, they’re just a tool, same as a saddle. It’s the same as using dressage whips, or spurs, or or the end of a rope or a bat. They use all kind of different things you know, and they think that one is severe and one is not. It’s how you use it, it’s a communication tool and that’s all. The most important thing is that when you go to bed at night you gotta feel good about what you did. There’s times I’ve gone to bed and I don’t feel good. There’s times I gotta go back the next day and I brush that horse a little longer and give him a little more treats. It’s just part of it, that’s training. My whole goal is every time I go to bed, I gotta feel good about what I did and how I got there, there’s a lot of ways to get there. You know the idea is that we keep getting better – as long as we’re making progress, as long as you can see progress, then you won’t lose your temper. It’s when you can’t find progress, when that fear sets in that I’m not gonna be able to get this done, when you can’t see that progress then all of a sudden your emotions take over, you lose control, you lose your temper, and you start doing things that you know you shouldn’t be doing.