[nrhareiner]

With my young reiners the first about 60 days or so is spent at a trot. I do a lot of circles. Once they get the idea to follow their nose then I star in with using 2 reins. In inside rein bends them and the outside rein gets them started braking at the pole giving them direction and a start at collection and balance. If you do not ride them and give them the help they need to learn to balance it will be hard for them to learn. Once they get those 2 basic things I star with spires out and in. Again this teaches them to collect and give to the bit and flex at the pole. Once they get that then we go to counter arking. Again this continues to teach them to give bend flex collect and it also gets them moving their shoulders over. This is the start of being able to teach them to turn.

At this time I will also start with backing. Backing and turning are very important in the respect that at this point they should know the work whoa. B/c it has been drilled into them at every starge of training up to this point. However if you are not carful when asking them to stop undersaddle they will start dumping on their front end. This is where the backing and turns come in handy. Stop back stop run one full turn each direction. Stop collect them up and trot off. Each of these things will lighten them up on the frount end.

Anyway these are just a few things in a short post that I do with my young reiners and I even will school the older ones at times doing the same thing. Keeps then sharp and crisp in the maneuvers.

Also if you have never riden a reiner little lone trained one. You should really at the very least find someone who has some experiance in reining to give you a hand. If you start them off wrong. IE truning on the wrong rear foot. Crossing over behind in the front. Dumping onto the front end in the stop and so on it is hard to brake. If you know what you are doing and how it should feel there are a lot of things you can do to correct them. However if you do not know how it should feel you will not know when it is wrong.

[Bluwind_Acres]

well I ride mostly WP so most of it I already know what it should feel like. otherwise my mom has a reiner thats finnished so Ill ride her some to get some good feel of the moves. but im not look at any real riding until next fall since he's so short.