Going for under 15 seconds on that cloverleaf pattern? You might be better off leaving the whip at the gate. New research shows that whipping and kicking barrel horses doesn’t seem to improve race time, but it does appear to increase unwanted behavior in the horse.

"At some amateur levels, barrel racing riders are encouraged to aggressively use both the whip and the leg to increase the velocity of the horse," said Karen Waite, MS, equine extension specialist and researcher at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing, Mich. "But there appears to be no relationship between the use of the whip, leg, or reins and the final run time of cloverleaf barrel race patterns."

On the contrary, horses that are whipped in the arena have a tendency to resist going into the arena, she said during a presentation at the 2012 conference of the International Society for Equitation Science. And the more horses are kicked, the more they have a tendency to rear up.

Waite and her research team, including Camie Heleski, PhD, behavior and equitation scientist at MSU, studied 64 youth riders and their horses during cloverleaf barrel race patterns. All the horses were ridden in the same arena in the same conditions. The researchers videotaped the rides and then closely evaluated rider and horse behavior from the time they approached the gate to the time they dismounted