Effective Training part 3: Improving your Skills
This is the Big Difference.
My whole teaching career began when I realised there were big holes in many of the common taught training techniques out there.
Holes that not only made it harder for horses to progress and easier for them to regress; but holes that changed horses from alive, sensitive and happy to mechanical, stiff, tense, unenthusiastic and sad.
The differences that I now see in horses that have been coming to my clinics for a while is HUGE. They are softer; they can respond; they have opened up…and they are happier.
What you do to train is covered in all of my Online videos. Pick any and you will see what I do.
>> This course though focuses on some fundamental key areas for you to consider before for all of your training – and you can work on them right now.
This is not so much about what you do, but how you do it. Your skill set.
1. Do One Thing. Well.
>> Your first training tip: watch to find out why this is so important
What you can do
Break your training down.
Assess how well your horse understands each piece.
Bring the pieces closer together over time as your horse masters them.
2. Have Good Purpose
Everything that we do with horses needs to have a purpose.
All of my training has a purpose. I teach horses to lead so that they feel comfortable in the halter, so that they don’t pull back, so my neighbour can catch it when I am away, so steering under saddle becomes easier. Leading creates better balance and posture. I ask horses to lead thoughtfully. The purpose is always there.
I am not a fan of tricks – they have no purpose. Did it benefit the horse? Or did it just benefit us?
A real purpose has not only a physical benefit but
also an emotional benefit.
Our purpose is usually to give our horses something.
Have a think about what you do in your training. You might want to avoid these:
- Lunging in a round yard because your horse has too much energy.If there is no purpose, it can be destructive. Just sending a horse around to wear it out or for exercise, has no emotional benefit for the horse. Maybe in our minds, there is a purpose (it gets the horse fitter, it takes away some energy) but our purpose is not portrayed: all the horse feels is “they don’t like me, all they are doing is pushing me around”. So our purpose wasn’t of benefit to the horse’s emotions. Carrying a tense, stressed body also isn’t helpful.
- Yielding horses shoulders away from you to show it that you can move its feet and help it to move its shoulders away.This exercise gets horses to yield their shoulders. But, it may just get your horse to feel that we want to push them away to gain control. It can leave the horse with a bad feeling. Instead, if we getting horses to give space by yielding the shoulders to go into a new direction. This still gets a horse to use its hindquarters and to yield but it will be thinking in the direction of travel whilst doing the yield, and is likely to feel more interested in the movement because you gave it space to go somewhere, opposed to you just taking space off it by pushing it away.
3. Offer Clarity
>> Watch this video to find out how you can improve your skills – and help your horse to feel better about what you are doing – by being clearer.
4. Be Accurate
When you are accurate, your horse is more likely to be accurate.
>> Watch this video to find out about one area that you might need to improve.
Keen to learn more?
Watch this additional video for a specific training example
It’s a video where I explain that the rope needs to be asking a clear question, not drooping.
Plus: Working on your leading hand and your rope skills is covered in the Challenge Series.
I encourage you to do the Challenge Series if you haven’t yet.
5. Know the Exact Answer before asking a Question
We need to know the answer to the question that we are pose to our horses.
When you ask your horse to walk behind you, what speed do you want it to walk at?
When you ask your horse to go into a trot, what trot are you looking for?
A true story
I was at a clinic with someone that had a rushy horse. I asked the person, “can you ask your horse – just with the feel of your legs – to ask for forward?”
It was a baited question.
They moved their horse off and then I stopped them and asked “What walk did you ask for?”
They said, “well, I kind of asked for a walk”
“Yes, but what one? Your horse gave you an anxious walk, did you ask for that walk?”
“No, not really”.
“Did you reward that walk by releasing your legs and letting them walk with anxiety?”
“Well maybe I did.”
So I asked what walk they would like.
Would they like their horse to have a calm, less anxious walk that is about a slow speed?
They said yes.
So I said, “how about we see if we can aim for that.”
I then asked them to try this: every time their horse takes a step that is outside of what they had in their mind, they were to stop it and correct it until their horse understood exactly the feel in their legs and what they were requesting.
Have a question in your mind when you go to do something.
Know the exact answer to that question before you ask it.
6. Don’t Micromanage
>> Watch the video below to think about an area that frequently see people overdo and why I see this causing problems.
7. Reduce your white noise
>> Watch this video to see what I mean by “white noise”
Training tip:
A horse should have more impulsion than you
8. Listen. But make a change
Listening is a key element in helping our horses. Listening is what gives us the feel to adjust to what we are doing to create positive change in our horses.
By listening, our horses can become more interested in us. They can start to communicate with us more.
But – we have to be careful, as listening to all of our horse’s communication could result in us rewarding/ reinforcing anxiety. Sometimes horses will convey what they want or feel. However, what they need might not necessarily be what they feel.
Two very similar examples of listening, just to get you thinking, are:
a) Approaching a young unhandled foal: we approach until the horse notices us and then we step back. We show them that we have listened; we don’t present a threat; and this gives them a little more time to process us. Doing this listening form of approach and retreat, the foal can become more curious until the space between us gets less with it’s increased confidence in us. It will lead to it sniffing us.
b) We approach a horse that gets nervous but has been ridden for quite some years: approaching it, we notice the horse goes to freeze. Do we catch it like the unhandled horse (stopping, allowing it to process and advancing in stages) or do we recognise that the horse is frightened of human energy approaching it and figure out a way that we can train it to adjust to human energy?
By catching the 2nd horse like the 1st, we would be rewarding and reinforcing the horse’s anxiety and lack of trust in human energy. Both scenarios included listening; but each horse had different needs.
>> So listening and responding exactly to the initial observation may not always be right.
9. Have Clear Boundaries
One of my sayings is, “We set boundaries – we don’t bring them to our horses”.
This is really important to give horse’s clarity and train in a positive way. What I mean by this is I often see a horse coming into someone’s space only to be chased out of that space. The horse hasn’t learned anything. The person only did what the horse did. The horse was shown “I push you, you push me”.
If you instead imagine an invisible wall around you, that is at any distance you wish. It is the limit of where you want your horse to be next to you. It might be a metre or 2 metres away. If you horse touches that wall (the bubble) – you do something that makes that horse aware that it is not welcome there. A sharp noise, a quick movement – something that changes complacency and curiosity into caution. Show your horse the boundary as soon as it touches it. Don’t blame it for coming in after it has pushed that boundary.
Once your horse steps off the boundary, everything goes quiet again.
>> Watch this video for a deeper explanation for you.
Summary
- Lack of clarity is one of the biggest causes of worry that I see in horses
>> be contentiously critical of your clarity: what are my hands doing; is my rope clear? How many signals am I portraying?
>> Improve your clarity by looking at your rope skills & accuracy. - Break your training down into pieces: it will help you to improve your skills and your horse to get better at tasks.
>> I have found foundations under foundations. For me – the depth of one tiny piece is never ending. I love the quest of refining every part. What amazes me is that horses will piece it all together themselves quicker than you think. - Always question what you do. It is benefiting your horse emotionally? What is the purpose? Could you be doing it in a different way?
- Be specific. Expect a specific answer.
- Help your horse to learn by not micro managing, not being accurate, reducing white noise.
- Try to always offer an alternative to anything we don’t want our horse to do
- Be consistent: Establish clear boundaries and keep them.
Congratulations! You have completed this Series, Effective Training!
We hope you enjoyed it.
If you have any questions, or want to check something over with me, you can always reach out to me via:
- Ask me a Question each fortnight: look out for the next Q & A session via email or the Support Group
- Send me a video for my personal tips
Let us know if you have any feedback about this course series.
Coming soon!
Stay tuned for a new online Master Class which will be added to the Online Membership shortly!
