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Online coaching allows riders to maximize their time and skills with help from top trainers who might otherwise be inaccessible.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the horse trainer of your dreams was
only a short drive down the road from you and your horse? Or, if every time you
wanted a lesson you didn’t have to put fuel in the truck, load up the trailer
with tack and equipment, fill a hay bag, hook up the trailer, load your horse
and then drive an hour or more?

The reality is that many folks don’t live near a trainer or
coach who can improve their horsemanship. It often isn’t practical or
financially feasible to send their horses many miles away only to be ridden by
a trainer or to haul long-distance for a mere hour lesson.

But thanks to information available online, help is just a
red “record” button away. Riders can now get one-on-one help from some of the
world’s leading trainers through online videos and coaching. A variety of
programs exist. Some require submission of a well-shot video to a trainer who
then critiques the ride and offers commentary and guidance. Other websites
simply provide access to instructional videos featuring other riders. But all
can be used in conjunction with an in-person lesson, training books and
magazines, and DVD sets.

For professional horsemen, the convenience of the Internet
increases their accessibility to riders and horses. All they have to do is
review an at-home or show video and provide constructive criticism.

The only thing simpler than finding a virtual coach is submitting your video. (Check out these tips before recording your ride.) So charge your smartphone, saddle your horse and hit “record.”

Personalized Programs

Rynde Thurston’s admiration for champion reining, cutting
and cow horse trainer Al Dunning began long before the World Wide Web was
mainstream. The Utah native grew up reading Dunning’s training books and
studying his videos, but that was the closest she could get to coaching from
the notable horseman.

“I’ve always loved and respected Al Dunning and his techniques, even when I was really young,” says Thurston. “But he’s far away from me. He’s in Arizona and I’m in Utah. And when he started Team AD, I thought, ‘This is a perfect way for me to learn from somebody who has been there and done that.’”

Dunning created Team AD about 10 years ago as a digital
platform to share video clips of him riding, with helpful voiceovers synced
with his videos. But he found the site fell flat in terms of content and he
wanted to create a way to connect with riders.

With the help of his daughter, McKenzie Parkinson, and
business manager Kelsey Roderique, he developed two coaching systems under the
Team AD name. The first is a video coaching program in which users can upload a
video of themselves riding at home or at a show, and Dunning will narrate the
video with a critique on riding, tack and equipment, and showmanship. Users can
purchase a single lesson or a set of three.

“I have people send me videos of reining, cutting, in the
show pen or at home, barrel horses and ranch riders,” says Dunning, a judge for
the National Reined Cow Horse Association and a multiple American Quarter Horse
Association world champion.

“Sometimes they just want to know from the judge’s
perspective what they can do better. Others want to win and revamp what they
have. Is my horse good enough? Is my outfit good enough? And some just want to
know about their showmanship. But I kind of give them it all.”

The other Team AD program is the Skill Assessment, in which
Thurston enrolled. It’s a step-by-step curriculum that consists of 53 skills
Dunning believes a well-rounded horse and rider ought to be able to perform.
Riders send one video at a time as they attempt each skill, and Dunning judges
the video on a pass-or-fail basis and offers pointers on how to master the
skill.

“In the first skill, you have to show how to pull your reins
properly,” says Dunning. “You have to know how to pull your reins properly
because your horse is not going to respond until you pull properly. The second
one is riding posture and how you use your feet in rhythm with your horse at
all three gaits. Then we talk about ‘doubling a horse’ and drawing their head
around, and then things like backing, looking at head position, and rhythm of
the feet.”

It took Thurston, a busy mom with two children, about eight
months and two horses to complete the Skill Assessment program. She found time
to record herself riding between driving her kids to school, keeping up the
family’s small cattle and horse ranch, and helping her kids with their 4-H
cattle.

“The way the program was laid out, I felt like I was
investing in my education and my future,” she says. “When I signed up, I
treated it like I was going to school. I was the first person to ever complete
it.”

Dunning isn’t the only accomplished trainer to offer virtual help. Bret Beach, a three-time Wrangler National Finals Rodeo qualifier and Bob Feist Invitational champion, founded totalteamroping.com in 2013 in conjunction with his RFD-TV show, Total Team Roping. Like Team AD, it started as a website that featured only roping runs of professionals.

“I was noticing that although I had 3,000 great roping runs
on the website talking about roping and how to do it, the people watching them
and who were roping weren’t getting particularly better,” he says.

Beach modified TTR so ropers could purchase a monthly or
yearly membership and send in videos for critique.

“So, you’re not watching the greatest guys in the world
rope. Now you’re actually seeing yourself and the things you need to fix at the
precise moment it’s happening,” he says.

He also enlisted the help of topnotch ropers like Clay
O’Brien Cooper and Charles Pogue to coach and tailor feedback, whether they’re
talking to headers or heelers, calf ropers, steer ropers or breakaway ropers.

“I always try to get different guests so that people can get
it from different aspects. People might tell you the same thing but tell it to
you in a different way that resonates better,” Beach says.

Equip
Yourself

With the incredible capabilities of smartphones today,
documenting a ride with quality photos and videos is quick and simple.

Tripods—or in many cases a little cowboy ingenuity using baling twine and a fence post—can be used to prop up a phone or video camera and record a ride. New devices, such as a SoloShot, track riders by using a GPS tracking device attached to the rider’s arm, much like a cutting flag remote control.

Joe Stricklin, a veterinarian and heeler from Greeley, Colorado, either has his wife record him with an iPad, or uses a SoloShot to record his heeling runs when he’s riding alone. He submits the videos to TTR.

“I can compare my runs to each other and get feedback from
Bret,” says Stricklin, who has been sending videos to Total Team Roping for
about three years. “I’ll get advice on my delivery, horse position, and even
the way I lay my rope down. Bret will watch the video in slow motion and
regular speed to see details in my roping we’d otherwise miss.”

John Mannebach, a graduate of Team AD’s Skill Assessment program, used a SoloShot when he was going through the program and continues to use one for video coaching. Mannebach trains stock dogs and runs a boarding kennel from his home near Wichita, Kansas, and finding time to ride, let alone coordinate with someone to video his ride, is difficult. As a solution, he built a wooden stand next to the arena and places the tripod and SoloShot on the stand to avoid getting the arena fence in the shot.

“When you go to a clinic, you get a lot of information
thrown at you all at once and you get overwhelmed,” says Mannebach. “There’s a
lot of pressure.

But with the video program you take it one day at a time. I
could go back and look at the videos, so it was like a trail of progress I
made.”

Thurston, on the other hand, used a video camera.

“I would find a good spot on a fence post in the arena, ride
past and press record, and ride off and do my thing. When I was finished, I
would ride back up to the camera, press stop and then upload it to YouTube,”
she says. “I didn’t have to have anybody here or enlist help from my husband or
my best friend. “Thurston believes that, at the end of the day, the only person
standing in the way of better horsemanship is the same person you see in the
mirror. “You don’t get anywhere sitting on the couch,” she says. “You can whine
and complain all day long and tell yourself you’re not good enough or worth it,
but you have to find that passion within yourself to grow and change. And that
takes standing up and taking action.”

TTR users upload videos directly to the website, while Team AD members upload theirs to a private account on YouTube. “I think the key to the online stuff is to keep it simple,” says Dunning. “You don’t have to be a technical genius to do this. We have you sign up, and set up a private YouTube account for you so others can’t see your video. But you can make it public if you want.”

Beach and Dunning try to turn videos around in less than two
days, and email confirmations are sent once they’ve dubbed over the film. If
there is feedback Dunning can’t fit within the time constraints of the video,
he’ll send it in an email.

Communication between teacher and coach is paramount to the
process, says Mannebach. “If you ride by yourself and you truly want to get
better, you’re not going to do it all by yourself,” he says.

Stay Consistent

John Mannebach completed Dunning’s Skill Assessment course
in the record time of four months. Dunning says in the nearly 10 years of the
program, only eight people have passed, with some students taking up to two
years to finish. Though he’d ridden most of his adult life, Mannebach says he
was amazed at how little he knew going into it, and credits dedicated riding
and his horse to his achievement.

“I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” says Mannebach. “I found
that I struggled when I rode by myself, and I didn’t have any way of knowing I
was doing it wrong. Plus, with my job, it was hard for me to go anywhere and go
to a trainer.

“I used the same horse for the entire program. I wanted to
do some cutting on him. He was way better than I was, and I’m sure I totally
messed with him during the course. But he was real forgiving, and now I’m using
what I learned on him on a 2-year-old I want to cut on.” The cost to
participate in online coaching may deter some riders, but Stricklin says
investing in your riding will pay dividends later.

The cost to participate in TTR ranges from $25 to $75 a
month, depending on how many videos you’d like to submit, and Team AD’s
programs start at $75 for one video coaching lesson, or $150 for three lessons.
The Skill Assessment program is broken into three stages, and starts at $250
for the first stage, $500 for stage two, and $750 for stage three.

When comparing the expense of a face-to-face
lesson—typically about $50 for one hour plus fuel, energy and time—to the cost
and convenience of a virtual lesson, the cost balances out.

“If you’re going to put the effort in day after day, you
need to be putting the correct effort in,” Stricklin says. “Online education is
a tool that people may not think of because we didn’t have it 10 or 20 years
ago. But if you dedicate yourself to it and make the time to ride, you’ll see
phenomenal results.”

Thurston says the convenience of online help worked best for
her hectic schedule. Every morning she set time aside to video her ride. “You
get out of it what you put in it,” Thurston says. “I made myself ride every
morning; that was my mindset. I took it very seriously.

“I would impatiently await [Dunning’s] response so I could
get back on it. I would fix things and send [videos] back. Online coaching
means you’re not just flying by the seat of your pants. You have a goal. Each
step is laid out for you and you check them off as you go. It’s fun and you can
see the light at the end of the tunnel as soon as each step is checked off. You
feel good about it.”

Years of coaching enable Dunning to distill his critiques to
what the rider needs to know.

“It is amazing what I can see in a four-minute video,” he
says. “I can give you a month’s worth of work in a four-minute video. I try to
make it a positive critique for people.

“It’s every bit as good as a one-on-one lesson. You could
take a lesson for one hour. And during the lesson you might have a few
questions, but you’re going to forget some questions, and you’re going to
forget some answers, also. Online, everything is recorded so you have time to
think about what you’re going to ask me. It gives me time to answer you
properly and then you’ve got it down for posterity. You have it down forever in
a video.”

Beach says it’s about going back to the foundations of
riding and roping, and working up from there. Keeping those fundamentals in
mind makes teaching through the Internet simple for the coaches.

“I try to narrow it down to the major things they need to
work on,” Beach says. “You can’t move on to step C until you finish A and B. I
want to see them develop a pattern. If someone sends me only one run, I can
only see what they did once. I can’t see what they did in the last five [runs].
If I can watch a few more, I can see the pattern and what habits come out every
time.”

Beach says the best tools ropers have to become better are
video coaching and roping clinics.

“But the problem is, if you’re going to do a school, there’s
only a select few good instructors out there, and they’re probably $500 [ for a
clinic],” he says. “Then you’re going to be gone at least four days, including
two days of travel, then two days in between. But with a video you can record
at your own convenience, watch it over and over, and see yourself versus
getting in a school and competing for attention with 15 other people.

Video coaching is like a continuing education class.” Video
coaching isn’t magic. It won’t replace a committed rider who is willing to put
in the wear in their saddle and dampen some saddle pads. But it does provide
invaluable access to trainers who are otherwise off limits.

“If you’re going to ride even halfway decent with the horse,
you have to set aside an allotment of time to ride,” says Dunning. “If you’re
in a hurry, you’ll never do a good job.

“It will take you a maximum of 10 minutes to take a video
and send it in. If it’s not worth 10 minutes of your time, you must not have
very much desire. “I want you to enjoy your horse and I want your horse to
enjoy you.

“I want you to be able to ride in and out of the arena
successfully. If you just want to ride and enjoy your horse, we can work on
that. But if you want to go in the show pen and win, I’ll take you there, too.”

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