When adjusting a horse's bridle, it's important to keep the chin strap loose so that the horse has time to react. Learn about safety features that prevent a horse from shaking a bridle off its head with helpful advice from a reining horse trainer in this video on adjusting a horse's bridle.
Notice as the bit went on, that it starts to make a wrinkle, right at the corner of his mouth. Notice that in this case, there's two wrinkles right there, at the corner of his mouth. Now that's too tight for me, alright. So I'm going to let this down, I only want one wrinkle at the corner of that horse's mouth when I get that bit adjusted correctly. So I'm going to let it down one notch, see what that looks like. Alright. That's still a little too much. So I'm going to let it down one more notch. There, now it's just right at the corner of his mouth. You can see one little wrinkle right there at the corner of his mouth. That bit is just going to pull right up at, at the, his lips right at the corner, makes one little wrinkle. The other adjustment that I need to make sure is right, is the chin strap. Now I want my chin strap actually pretty loose. I want to be able to get, notice four fingers, basically my whole hand in behind that chin strap. Now that gives a horse room or time to react, to respond to what my hands are doing or the leverage that's being applied with this bridle. If he was too tight, he would act abruptly and almost react and I don't want a reaction, I want a response. There's a big difference between the two. So if I want him to respond, I'm going to loosen that chin strap up, to just where it is right now. It's got a nice comfortable four fingers behind and then when I go to actually work with the horse in my hands and adjust that bit in his mouth. He's going to have that ample time to be able to respond and not again, react to the things I want him to do. I also want to make sure that there's no hair tucked up underneath here, underneath the head stall and the reason is because that, you know, might cause him to shake his head while I'm riding. You know, hair that gets stuck in around his ears. If you've got like on this particular bridle, I've got an ear piece, that goes up around one ear and I highly recommend at least a one ear, if not two and the reason is because I don't want, if this horse shakes his head, I don't want that bridle to just fall off. It's possible that if he didn't have an ear piece, one or two, that he could shake that and it just fall right off of his head. They also make head stalls that connect to the bridle, that actually have a strap that goes in underneath his chin and that's another safety feature to keep him from shaking the bridle off of his head. You can imagine in fly season horses are going to be shaking his head, flies get around his ears, last thing you want to have happen is that head stall and the bridle fall off and there you sit with nothing, you know, no way to control him. Alright, we've got that all adjusted, we're ready to go ahead and step on.
