Just go ride your horse. I believe horsemanship is one of the most underrated and overlooked aspects of breakaway roping. There are so many benefits to good horsemanship and learning how to ride well.

First off, learn how to ride. Go to clinics, learn from trainers, and then put everything you’ve learned into practice. Ride every chance you get. The more you ride the better in shape and more balanced you’ll become. As you become a better rider and more comfortable on a horse’s back, it’ll be easier to learn how to rope off a horse. As I was growing up, I rode my naughty miniature ponies around bareback everywhere I went. At the time I didn’t realize how beneficial that would be later in life, but looking back now I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Learn good horsemanship from somebody with experience. I was fortunate enough to learn all about training and riding horses from an old horseman from Nevada. Everything was done very slowly. You have to go slow to get there fast. That goes for so many aspects of roping and riding horses. I learned how to ride with my body and legs. One of the major components that’s transferred over to my breakaway roping now is that when I sit down and stop kicking, my horses are stopping. My horses ride off my body and not the reins. You don’t need a bigger bit to get a horse to stop if you’ve done the slow work of teaching them. I ride my good mare in a thick leather hackamore, and I ride my other horse in just a short-shanked snaffle bit.

It’s so important to learn the basics of training a horse. At some point, your horse is going to do something wrong, and you need to figure out why and how to fix it. Is it something that you’re doing to cause this, are they hurting, or are they trying to get away with something? If your horse isn’t hurting, most of the time it is something that you’re doing to cause the problem. Are you pulling on their mouth leaving the box, do you quit kicking as you’re running up to the calf, are you not riding to the calf? There’s a whole multitude of situations that you could unknowingly be telling the horse to do one thing but wanting a different reaction. Regardless, if it’s something you’re doing to cue the horse wrong, or something they are just trying, you’ll need to know how to fix it.

The more you ride and become comfortable on a horse’s back the easier roping will come, so just go ride your horse.