How to Stop a Horse in Rodeo Barrel Racing

"Hi, I'm Holly Heidemann and on behalf of Expert Village, today I'm going to talk to you about stopping and backing your horse and the importance it plays in a barrel racing pattern. Today, when we talk about stopping, there's three things I want to watch with my body, and my hands, and my, my feet. The first thing is when you're asking a horse to go forward, your body must be forward. Your hands have to be forward, your body has to be leaning slightly forward, your feet should be under your hips. If you try to stop a horse and you're already in the stopping position as you're riding around, it doesn't feel any different to them, but if you're riding and you're riding slightly forward and then you go to a stopped position, your horse can feel the difference. So first things first, when you're talking about stopping, have to talk about going. So going forward, make sure you lean forward at the waist, hands forward, feet underneath you hips, and then we're going to prepare for the stop. When you're getting ready for the stop, you're going to do three things. First, you're going to sit down, so we were forward - now we're going to sit down and back. People call that the cutter C where you kind of make a C with your body. So make hips are tucked underneath me, I'm sitting down, that's the first thing you do. The next thing you do is say the word "Whoa". Whoa is the universal word for stop, if your horse has been schooled properly that means something to him. The last thing you're going to do is squeeze on the reins. Not pull or yank, but squeeze. So we're going to sit, say whoa, and we're going to gather and squeeze with our fingertips like this to stop our horse. That's what we're going to do and I'm going to demonstrate this with fences. This is a really efficient way to teach your horse to stop. I'm going to do it with a little bit of speed so you can see how the horse can get his hind end up and underneath him in a stop."