Trainers Pen

The Roll Back

 

A Required Drill

 

When we put some horses in the paddock, they’ll do the usual things—walk, trot, lope, stand around.  Sometimes they’ll run along the fence, then suddenly pivot and head back in the opposite direction without losing much speed or momentum.  They’re basically performing a rollback.

 
In shooting, a rollback is used when you’re making a tight turn.  A rollback is basically doing a 180-degree turn.  You go forward and then turn in the exact opposite direction.  And you want your horse to be as collected as possible so that when it turns it can power off its hips and you don’t lose any time or motion.  Because if your horse swings its back end and turns on its front end, it takes too many strides to get going forward again.

 

A rollback that is done correctly takes a lot of time to work out.  It takes a fair amount of patience.  When you’re first teaching the horse (and rider), start at a walk.  When you approach the rollback point, stop your horse.  Set him square.  Stay seated in the saddle. And then work the inside rein, asking the horse to turn.  As it does so, start to work the outside rein, which will encourage the animal to cross over.  Take a peek at the inside rear leg, which makes your body go with the turn and helps the horse complete the move.  And remember the key point: you want the horse’s front legs to cross over while the back legs stay firm and provide a pivot.

 

You’re probably not going to get it just right on the first several tries, but keep at it.  When you and the horse can consistently rollback, move up to a trot and speed up the process. Eventually you want to be able to do it at a lope, maintaining your momentum without ever slowing down.  It takes time to get there.

 

There are plenty of pitfalls, of course.  Frequently, when people start doing rollbacks, they’ll do something that causes the horse to slow down into a trot—or even stop.  They may set the horse too hard into the turn, causing the animal to stall.  Or they won’t position the reins correctly—say, they’ll hold the outside rein too tight so the horse’s head is going in the opposite direction of the turn.  It’s imperative that you start with the inside rein so the horse has direction, and then come across the outside rein and the outside leg. 

 

And one more point—often, when a person does a rollback and the horse’s head turns to the outside, the rider will be up in the stirrups.  Their weight is at the front end of the horse, which causes the animal’s front end to stop as the back end comes around.  That’s pretty much the opposite of what should happen.

 

How do you know if you and the horse are doing things correctly?  It always helps to have an experienced hand watching, someone who can tell you where the legs are, where your reins are, etc.  If you’re by yourself, you can work along a fence to help learn the turning steps.  But an observer is the best way to go.

 

How important is it to pull off great rollbacks?  By themselves, maybe not much; only a couple of stage patterns actually feature rollbacks.  But everything you do with a horse is a piece toward something else.  Once your horse gets efficient with its front end and hind end, it makes your barrel turns better.  It makes your regular turns better.  So mastering rollbacks is a key to effective competition.

 

So how much time can you save by doing a tight rollback?  That’s hard to say; it could be two or three-tenths of a second, depending on the horse, the breed, etc. Cow horses, which are smaller and more compact, are much more efficient at turns than a big, rangy thoroughbred that has to lift its front end to come around. 

 

It’s always important to keep the animal tuned up and really light.  A rollback—or just about any maneuver—is not something that a trained horse will remember forever.  You always have to go back to the basics.  When we start working with horses each morning, we flex for about five minutes before we even walk or trot, just trying to keep them as supple as possible.  Then we trot for a while.  Then we do some turns, some stops, some rollbacks.  Then we accelerate it.  So everyday it’s the same program to keep them at the level they need to be.  The repetition is how horses (and riders) learn. 

 

And it’s what makes them more competitive in the sport of mounted shooting.

 

Dan Byrd Performance Horses is owned and operated by Dan Byrd. Located in the Cave Creek/New River area in the heart of Arizona. Along with horse sales, he offers horse and student training specializing in Cowboy Mounted Shooting.

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