Sit! Look! Where To ‘Look’ For A Successful Pattern

We hear it ringing out at every race, “look! LOOK!”. It’s a part of any run, but where you look can be just as important as remembering to look up in the first-place. Our horses feel an up to 10% weight shift when we look down. In a sport where a tenth of a second can separate you from winning money, every bit of that 10% matters. We look up and forward to set up the ideal start to our turn, and to encourage a horse to extend its stride and cover more ground. Where we look helps not just our horses, but us too. Knowing where to drive to and having an idea of when and where to cue for our turn helps knock those seconds off and make those beautiful tight turns. 

The ideal turn is set 6 Ft off your barrels, giving avid room for the horse to extend their stride and maintain speed while not being so close we knock a barrel. So one assumes that looking 6ft off the barrel is enough. However, think of the angle we approach. Our vision will quickly adjust to the distance from the barrel, making our “6 foot” spot a whole lot closer as we run to our barrel. Especially when we look to our first, our perspective changes, so we don’t want to look at our 6 foot mark, we want to look past it and diagonally by a few perceived feet. Additionally, looking past our barrel helps the horse make a turn deep enough to drive their strides around, and assists in not shutting down too early.

  Here I have a diagram of how I’d like you to picture your ‘look point’ (this is my 2nd barrel from half way across the arena) You'll be approaching from a parallel angle, so you’ll  need to make a bit of an obtuse triangle to imagine the correct spot. Additionally,( see below) you can see that my cone I’m using to mark 6 feet is perfectly in line with my pole marking my ‘look point’. Set up a pole or a piece of tape on the top rail of your arena at home to get the muscle memory. There’s no shame in using every tool in the book to help us improve our times. I always keep some sort of ideal look point while running at home. If you are running at an arena, those look points can be objects, banners, people, or even just a rail on the fence.

My cone marks my 6 ft mark, and my pole marks where I want to be looking. NOTE: This is for the average horse. I’d be grossly ignoring the complexity of running the pattern if I didn’t mention horses who drop in too soon or need more room. You can, of course, adjust for these situations. Make sure you’re adjusting both farther past and farther away from the barrel, your look point is to help you visualize, so make it work for you! 

On this page I’ve done a diagram (my camera isn’t good enough to really capture the angle from so far off unfortunately) on the top that shows a zoomed in version of what we may see heading to second from across the arena. The picture is my set up where the barrel, cone, and pole all appear to be in a line, again to exaggerate angles… we see it this way because I’m standing in front of the barrel and off to the side. I want to really show how you can play with and get comfortable with angles!

The true term for what we’re experiencing is Perspective Angle. Perspective Angle is everywhere, it makes huge objects look tiny or can make things look as if they’re the same size. It’s one of those kindergarten concepts we never put too much thought in to. However, now that we want to make our seconds melt off the clock in the barrel pen, we’ll be using it today!

Here’s what our angles truly look like from above. You can see that past our 6ft mark is going to look quite far. Angles truly matter, our approach is an illusion that is determined by our distance from the barrel. Choosing the correct spot from the beginning prevents you from fighting your own perception. Hopefully after using this post as a guide, you’ll feel confidant in setting up your look points to help you.

Here’s about the best I could capture that angle to second barrel in person. This is taken from about 20 feet away.

To keep my horse pushing to the next barrel, I need to look past not just my barrel, but my 6 ft mark as well. Picking the correct spot to look helps me cognitively ride to the correct point without having to second guess myself. Building a good instinct for where to look helps us when we get that “what the heck was I supposed to do” feeling we all get the second we burst out of the alleyway. 

Having a solid understanding of where to look once we round our turns really gives us a mission; drive right there. While you run to the next turn, all focus can be on that critical point. Staying focused and determined during our runs can be hard, but when we break down some of the details, we can ensure we stay mentally tuned in instead of getting overwhelmed. I use and teach a ‘look point’ to de-complicate my job while running barrels, I want to be able to really be a thinking rider so I can help my horse and myself be successful. 

Happy hoofin’ and feel free to use my ‘contact’ page to ask questions or suggest future blog topics!