The Various Gaits of a Horse

The quality of a horse's walk during horse reining should be relaxed, calm and quiet, which indicates a horse ready to listen to its rider's commands. Understand the proper gait for reining horses with helpful advice in this video on riding and caring for horses.

In a reining pattern, the quality of the walk really is not as important as it would be in something such as a rail class. But when you are, you what you are looking for is just a nice relaxed look on your horse. You would like for their top line to be level and that would be their pole and neck and withers, and their back. You would like for them to be just just walk quiet and not be rushed and not look scared or intimidated. With the reiners, again here we do not do any long trotting but it is important of some of the other disciplines in the rail classes. Here again it is a two beat gait, the only thing that is different about it is it is with more forward motion than the jog, your horse should top line should be low and level just like the jog. Your horses frame is also lower and longer at the long trot than what it is at the jog. We do use the jog in the long trot with the reiners to warm up, teach collection, and to enforce forward motion. When we move our horses out from the lope, we are still looking for that same collection and drive from behind, but we want for them to be moving on just a little bit quicker, cover more ground and still be relaxed and quiet. For a quality jog in a western horse, you are looking, it is not so much important again as it is in the rail classes the reiners you actually get penalized if you trot. But quality jog is a two beat gait, it should be nice and quiet the legs work on a diagonal, your horses head should again just like the walk be nice and low and level, the top line should be nice and quiet and level, and your horse should be relaxed and look like a pleasure to ride. With the lope what you are looking for is again a nice level top line, collection, you want to see them being soft in the bridle and driving from behind. The lope is a three beat gait they should maintain that, a lot of horses try to lope and go too slow and they do what is called four beating which is not a true lope.