Does your horse struggle with focus?

Does your horse know how to focus it's attention on you?

Does it know how to concentrate on a task?

Does it know how to problem solve and seek the right answer?

It may surprise you to know that horses don’t instinctively know how to learn and find answers.

Instinctively they know how to protect themselves - and if figuring out and doing what you ask keeps them safe then they will do that. But focusing on you and problem solving doesn’t come easy to each horse.

That's why we created the training trainability program.

It teaches the horse how to look for and seek the answers. It teaches them how to be curious instead of scared. It teaches them how to concentrate and focus on us. It helps develop a learning, problem solving brain that can hold it's attention without getting distracted.

The exercises are super easy to implement and can open a two way conversation between you and your horse so that they are softer and more willing. It gives you the basic training principles so that when they aren't working with you you can problem solve an answer.

Keen to know more? Click here!

Is Your Horse Doing Your Head In?

One of the things I tell my students is that the thing with your horse that is absolutely doing your head in is also why you love them.

That horse that spooks and shies at everything also has a good work ethic and is a people pleaser.

That horse that pushes into you and over the top of you is a perfect trail rider that is rock solid no matter what comes his way.

Knowing your horse - the good, the bad and the ugly - helps you bring out the positives of their temperament and manage those not so desired behaviours. And hopefully somewhere in the middle we find balance.
What's your horse doing that does your head in?

Need help finding the balance? Ask us more about the Training Trainability Program!

Getting a stronger bond with you horse

Do you wish you had a stronger relationship with your horse?

Does it just not feel right or like there’s something missing?

Are you looking for answers to behavioural issues?

Maybe if my horse liked me more it wouldn’t be so skittish and spooky or bargy and pushy?

Developing a relationship with our horses is the long road seldom travelled. Because once you know how to make or manipulate a horse into doing what you want it to you don’t really need to rely on the relationship anymore. The better you get at making horses do things and hanging on to their outbursts the less you need them to be willing because well they actually are willing and the more their willingness comes because they have no other option.

At some stage we will hit a plateau with our horse. At this stage we may sell and try a new horse hoping the next one will be our answer. This can happen several times over, always seeking but never finding that magic that we are looking for of complete union in the saddle.

What your lacking is called connection. It is when your horse is interested and engaged in the learning process, it enjoys moving in harmony with you and its attention and focus is on you always. When you head to the paddock they come to the gate to greet you. When you dismount they give you a soft knicker in appreciation of the ride. Its not this constant fighting and battle that leaves you exhausted and makes just the idea of tacking up feeling like your pulling teeth.

That connection starts with us. We have to put the time and the effort into building a relationship and rapport with our horses. Not leave them feeling like they are a cog in the machine.

When was the last time you sat with you horse just to enjoy being with them?

Finding The Deeper Meaning Of The Basics

Our easy, basic exercises are simultaneously the easiest thing you will do and the hardest thing you will do well. The reason being is that the basics are entry level riding and the foundations of every thing else you do with your horse. So if you’re like me and been riding for 26 years and teaching for 14 years you’ve run through the basics thousands of times (no exaggeration). And each new horse I work through it with, each new rider I work through it with, each time I get a horse to a certain level of education hit a plateau and say ok time to go back to the basics I am learning something new, a different perspective and a deeper understanding of something that is so simple that a person who has never ridden it before can do.

This is why in our course green to self carriage we have tiered it to comfortably and easily move up and down the training scale. We have included all prerequisites and progressions in each lesson plan so if the current lesson plan has gone to crap you know what building blocks to strip back to but also if its too easy you know which exercise to work on next.

There is a huge difference in the halt a person rides the first time they ride a horse and the halt they ride a year later. There is a huge difference in the halt a person rides compared to a person who has had lessons with a good instructor every week for a year. There is a huge difference between the halt a person rides after a year of riding, 5 years of riding, 10 years of riding and 20 years of riding. With experience comes understanding and refinement and the horses we work with in that time are generally keen to teach us a thing or 2 also.

So before you rush on to that next movement, exercise or challenge, before you say “oh that exercise is too easy for us now” or “that exercise is boring I learnt that when I was first riding”, check in with you and your horse. Can you find a deeper meaning to the exercise? Can you learn something about it that you didn’t know before? Can your horse teach you something in that exercise that you couldn’t learn the first time you did it because your own feel and ability wasn’t ready?

Because trust me, I’ve been there. I’ve been the rider that hates practising halting because you only have to do it 2 maybe 3 times in a test. I’ve been the person that has said why do I need to get better at my walk through canter changes before I learn my flying changes? I’ve been the person that has rushed a horse through the basic principles to try and get to the “good stuff” and it just never works out the way we imagine. I am still learning new things about the most basic things we can do with a horse because I like to try and be a student of life which means I let my horses teach me how they want me to work best with them and I let my students teach me their perspective and feel of their horse.

We Don't Need To Be Challenging Our Horse's Boundaries Every Time We Ride

For some reason every time we ride we expect the ride to be better than our last.

We want to have done something that we weren’t able to do last ride.

We want our horse to perform better, be more willing, more submissive, more expressive - but how fair is that on our horse?

Are you able to do better at work every day than you did the day before? Or better at the gym or a sport you may play? Or horse riding for that matter? Can you bring your 100% every day? Be enthusiast? Pleasant to be around especially under pressure? Can you learn something new every day?

Seems like a tall ask.

But we expect it of our horses. And then wonder why behavioural issues pop up!

So today I give permission for you and your horse to just hang.

To just enjoy each other. Do what your horse likes. Do they like treats, going on adventures, being groomed? What things do you do that your horse really enjoys and appreciates?

I give you permission to go do just that. Then get back to us - how did it feel? Did you enjoy yourself? Did your horse enjoy itself?

I even give you permission to do it a couple of days in a row.

And then do your training and see if your horse is more willing, more enthusiastic, more eager to learn and participate in the activities.

My 2 Cents On Clicker Training...

Let me start this with we 100% love and support the use of positive reinforcement in our training.

Used with clear, consistent boundaries, it can help our horses learn by giving them a stronger motivation, help them enjoy the learning process more, help maintain our relationship throughout the training process and can just make hanging out together more fun and less work. And that is the concept that clicker training is based upon.

You can achieve the same result with the Trainability Program as you can with clicker training - without any extra equipment.

Horses seem to be the only animals where positive reinforcement (i.e. treats and pats) is routinely considered a big no-no. But when you look at all the zoo animals that use clicker training, (elephants, seals etc), the argument against it seems to really not make much sense at all.

The problem with clicker training, however, is the limitation of the actual clicker.

You need to use the clicker to mark the behaviour that you want, but aren’t most of us marking the behaviour already when we say good boy/good girl? Or when we give the horse a break for doing well?

We all know that horse that stops dead in its tracks because you said “good”. Some of us are even marking the incorrect behaviour by releasing pressure for the incorrect behaviour or if the horse is scaring us or bullying us.

The first time I tried to “charge” the clicker with the exercise as per clicker training, I realised my horse already knew these exercises and I had other cues and vocals/noises that not only reinforced the correct behaviour but also corrected the behaviour I didn’t want.

I think the application of clicker training can teach a lot of people how to better interact with their horses.

It teaches the horse to seek the answer, not get frustrated by the process and stay curious about their learning. All of which are important when it comes to creating a positive relationship with our horse that wants to please and is willing. But this can all be done without the clicker, and instead with vocal cues and body language.

So while clicker training is a great concept, it is only a new process applied to the positive reinforcement techniques we should practice and know for our horses. When you work with positive reinforcement to help your horse become more trainable, you eliminate the need for gimmicky or extra tools.

Would you like to learn the concept of true Trainability skills? Click here!

Setting up your horse for success

We often get told not to let our horse anticipate the aid like it’s a bad thing.

But shouldn’t we celebrate the fact the horse is ready and eager to do what we ask and congratulate ourselves that we’ve been able to communicate and teach our horse to understand us?

Sure, we don’t want our horses to do what we’re asking before we are asking in a dressage test. But do we break their confidence by reprimanding them for it or do we encourage our horse and reward them for their effort and willingness and help them associate it to a cue/aid. Are you setting your horse up to succeed or to fail?

Setting our horse up to succeed is helping them, encouraging them and rewarding them for looking for the right answer. Its making the right answer easy and the wrong answer hard. Its making learning fun and easy. Its making training achievable. When our horses have little training wins it releases happy hormones that makes learning fun. If our horses are always in trouble for getting it wrong or not doing well enough the learning process gets stale and unenjoyable. Our horses stop lose courage to try, stop asking questions and shut down… or sometimes lash out.

Rules to live by to set our horse up to success:

-        First do no harm

-        Finish feeling like you could’ve done more

-        Finish on a positive note

-        Spend time with your horse that isn’t being ridden

-        Try not to repeat an ask more than 3 times before changing the exercise

-        Make sure they know what we’re asking and can do what we’re asking and we haven’t pushed them past their physical, mental and emotional limit.

-        Horses learn from the release of pressure not the application

-        Be clear, consistent and follow through on your asks.

We don’t need to be challenging our horses’ boundaries every time we ride

For some reason every time we ride we expect the ride to be better than our last. We want to have done something that we weren’t able to do last ride. We want our horse to perform better, be more willing, more submissive, more expressive but how fair is that on our horse?

Are you able to do better at work every day than you did the day before? Or better at the gym or a sport you may play? Or horse riding for that matter? Can you bring your 100% every day? Be enthusiast? Pleasant to be around especially under pressure? Can you learn something new every day? Seems like a tall ask right? But we expect it of our horses. And then wonder why behavioural issues pop up.

So today I give permission for you and your horse to just hang. To just enjoy each other. Do what your horse likes. Do they like treats, going on adventures, being groomed? What things do you do that your horse likes? I give you permission to go do that. And then get back to us. How did it feel? Did you enjoy yourself? Did your horse enjoy itself? I even give you permission to do it a couple of days in a row. And then do your training and see if your horse is more willing, more enthusiastic, more eager to learn and participate in the activities.

Developing A Bond With Your Horse

We recently hosted a free workshop in our Facebook group with exercises that helped to develop a stronger bond with our horses.

To be honest, I was surprised by the number of people that joined because they wanted a stronger bond with their horse (which I’m stoked about). I was expecting people to join the workshop wanting to fix certain problems they were having with their horses.

And it got me thinking: I have my understanding of what I want in a bond and a relationship - but what do others expect?

What is a bond?

A bond is stronger than just liking someone. But we do have to start there. We have to like our horses and they have to like us. Liking each other, enjoying each others company and wanting to spend time together fosters an environment where a bond and a relationship can be born.

A bond with another is built on social connection and nurturing the emotional needs of the individuals. These emotions include trust, affection, gratitude and love amongst others. As we build trust and feel safe that they won’t hurt us, we break down our emotional boundaries. The trust and social connection established in a bond make us feel valued, loved and cared for.

Training and developing a relationship or a bond go hand in hand whilst also being polar opposites. You can have a trained, well behaved horse without nurturing their emotional needs, and you can have a relationship without our horse being educated and responding correctly to our asks. Training, our goals and our expectations can easily damage our relationship and bond with our horses if we aren’t respectful of our horses’ emotional needs.

• Asking our horse to do something that is scary or putting them in a situation that they may get hurt.

• Not listening to them when they say “I’m overwhelmed”, “I’m scared”, “I need a break”.

• Using force to get what we want from them even if why we are getting it is because they don’t understand or can’t do.

• Expecting them to bring their ‘A’ game every ride and be better than their last even when we aren’t as riders.

All these things can damage our relationship with our horse and create undesirable behaviours in our horse or lead them to shutting us out and just performing the task asked without enjoying it.

As easy as it is to breakdown this relationship, it’s just as hard to build a strong healthy relationship and bond. A bond is created through times of difficulty or hardship. Have you ever had a horse that you have nurtured while sick or injured and noticed after they recovered that the relationship had strengthened? Being able to guide a horse through a difficult experience safely so that it becomes a positive experiences helps us to show up as leaders and our horses to learn to trust us. The other way is just spending time together and offering a company.

This is why the workshop was based on small, easy to implement exercises done consistently. This is why we harp on having the same expectations of our horse every time we handle them, no matter how time poor we are. So that when we put them in more challenging exercises or experiences they trust us and know what is expected on them. We stop feeling like we could have done more on a positive note without overfacing them. Because each interaction with our horse is first to build this trust, relationship and bond and then secondly to work towards our goals.

If you want to join us for our next workshop, make sure you are on our email list by signing up below!

Horse Care & The Impact On Training

Have you ever considered that how your horse lives has an impact in their ability to learn?

A horse’s living conditions can ultimately play a huge role on their trainability. The mental and emotional health which largely is the result of feeling safe, having needs met and having social engagement affects how well they can learn and their willingness.

1. Being in a confined space for extended periods of time

Horses are meant to be in open space and spend the day grazing along with some time resting. When they are confined and you only let them out to be worked, getting into that open space can make it harder for them to focus and work.

2. Routine

Where horses have been malnourished in the past, or even when they simply don’t have the option to graze, they can be stressed about when and where they’re next feed is. This stress has a flow-on effect to their training. Having a consistent routine for your horse helps to keep them more relaxed as they know what to expect and when.

3. Social engagement

Horses are a herd animal and also a prey animal. When they live solo it is hard for them to feel safe enough and relax properly. This alertness with lack of rest over a long period of time is damaging on the nervous system. It can make the horses irritable, lack focus, spook at everything or even incredibly lethargic.

4. Adequate roughage

Getting the right feed for your horse is a crucial part to having your horse in a good training brain. Some feeds can make your horse hot and anxious, give your horse a bloated upset belly or make them lethargic. Adequate roughage is important to keeping your horses’ digestive tract healthy and the horse full, relaxed and healthy.

5. Shelter

Horses love a good resting place for their midday nap. Providing an area for rolling, resting, getting out of the sun or weather is important to their daily routine and overall health.

What you horse needs from you to learn

A horse needs a lot from its trainer to be able to learn – and we want our horses to learn, not just submit.

They need to respect you!

• If they don’t think you are competent,

• if they think they are more capable of keeping themselves safe without you,

• if they think you are going to put them in situations that they aren’t ready for or will get hurt in,

• if they think you aren’t putting the effort in with them ...

...then why should they do what you ask?

Think of a situation at work where someone of authority that wasn’t particularly good at their job kept asking you to do something. Do you do it with enthusiasm eager to prove yourself? Or do you dig your heels in becoming more and more begrudging of them? What if you were doing work for someone you respected but they didn’t reward you for your efforts and just asked more from you? Do you keep giving them a 100% or do you start to become resentful of them?

To prove yourself as a leader they need you to create clear, consistent discipline, where you follow through on your ask. You need to provide a safe learning environment and not put them in situations that they can be hurt.

How can you provide your horse a better working and learning environment?

1. Don’t become emotionally engaged in their arguments.

When our horses do test us and push our boundaries, getting angry or frustrated and arguing with them rarely helps. We suggest that you avoid getting into a battle of the wills and work instead on staying centered, relaxed and balanced. Focusing on consistent expectations rather than winning the argument.

2. Consider lowering your expectations

If we want our horses to be enthusiastic and engage in their training, we need to focus on rewarding their effort and for trying rather than pushing for a certain thing we want to achieve. This keeps them interested in learning and keeps their mind open to being curious. We reward for effort, finish on a good note, feeling like we could’ve done more.

3. Know what we are trying to achieve and break it down for them

How many times have you done something because someone has told you you should be doing it with your horse but you don’t know why or how? Well if you don’t know, how can your horse know? Be very clear in your mind in what you are trying to achieve. Often there are multiple steps involved to get to this goal so it is important that we know how to break it down to the smaller steps that build up to that point as well. That also helps us to reward for effort, finishing on a good note, feeling like we could have done more. We know that the steps are just as important if not more important than the end result and can see the path.

4. Make sure you use clear communication

Our horse needs us to understand how they learn and how best to communicate with them, so they understand what is being asked of them. They also need a way to communicate if they need a break because they are overwhelmed, confused or tired. They need us to know when they are trying, to be compassionate if they can’t do it and not let the communication break down.

5. Be patient

They need us to remember that, at the end of the day, they are still a horse and they are letting us ride them and handle them. If they are having an off day, they are sore, fatigued physically or mentally, or having some other problems, we need to be patient and forgiving. It needs to be a 2 way street where we are not always demanding of them, but making the learning and riding process as comfortable and interesting as possible.

You need to teach your horse HOW to learn

Horses aren’t born into this world knowing how to be ridden.

They don’t know appropriate and safe ways to interact with humans.

They don’t know what’s expected of them.

In some cases, such as where they are weaned early, kept separate from other horses or go through poor living conditions such as dogger pens and feed lots, they don’t even know how to socialise with other horses – they only know how to do their best to protect themselves.

Our most common tool for training is negative reinforcement through pressure from halters, bits, spurs, and whips. Horses don’t automatically know what these pressures mean and what the appropriate response to those pressures are. Expecting them to know this is like a person starting a new job with a completely complex computer program, being shown their seat and left to figure it out – they are either going to try and fail, try and succeed, look for help or break down and quit.

Is it any wonder that horses become “naughty” if teaching them to learn isn’t done well?

Horses first need to learn how to process pressure and what it means. They need to know that pressure isn’t pain and isn’t there to hurt them, but is there to help them seek the answer.

Which means we need to know how to use pressure & release correctly to teach this.

The first and most important lesson you need to learn to communicate more effectively with horses:

“You can’t beat understanding into a horse”.

If a horse doesn’t understand what you want using the whip, spurs, halter or bit, using them harder and harder and harder doesn’t make them understand any better.

A lot of times, when a horse isn’t doing what its told, it’s classified as a naughty horse and you are told to be harder and stronger with them. However, in my experience if a horse isn’t doing as its “told”, it’s more commonly because it doesn’t understand, or can’t do what’s being asked. So they “act out” or are “naughty” because they resort to instinctive behaviour or past experiences to respond to the ask – and their instinctive behaviour when confused, intimidated or scared is to fight or run away.

There are definitely times when horses will challenge you and your authority but that’s not with the intent of being naughty – it is with the intent of testing if they can trust you. Are you strong enough and confident enough to lead them and keep them safe? If they decide you aren’t a good leader, they won’t feel safe doing as you ask and will react with the intent to protect themselves.

This is the one situation where being heavy handed can work. However, it’s not the best nor is it the most effective tool, especially if you’re already working with a bold, strong, confident horse. You need to be a really…. really… reaaaaally good rider to convince these horses with a heavy hand because their responses can escalate to big dangerous behaviours and it is hard to not get hurt in these situations until we get submission.

That is why we should teach discipline through consistency and following through with our ask, then rewarding for EFFORT, not necessarily the best most correct behaviour. We first condition how our horses mentally and emotionally process the ask before we get them understanding what the ask is. This may take a little longer in the outset, but sets us and our horses up to learn easily down the track.

When there is a clear pathway of consequence, our horses start looking for the right answer, interacting and engaging with us and enjoying the learning process.

Train your horse to be “trainable” with our Training Trainability course - an online training program designed to support the overall learning capabilities of your horse and based on simple exercises that reinforce affection, trust, respect and communication. Click here to learn more.

Why professional trainers, breakers and instructors ride for submission.

Why do most professional trainers, breakers and instructors ride their horse into submission?

Short answer – it’s the quickest and easiest way to get their desired results.

Trainers and breakers only have a short period of time to get big results. They also are very competent riders that don’t baulk at a horse bucking, bolting, rearing and acting out and will just ride them through that behaviour into submission. They simply don’t have the time to spend with the horse to take it at that individual horse’s pace.

Another reason why professionals work for submission is because they don’t have the time to develop the trust and relationship to get the results this way.

Getting our horses to say “yes”, as opposed to submission (not sure what this means – read this first), is because what and how we ask depends on how well-established our relationship, trust and leadership is established. This takes time. With any of my students that get a new horse, I recommend that it takes a year minimum. Normally, when you send your horse away on training, they get maybe 6 – 8 weeks to get the horse to confidently and safely to walk, trot and canter, and to look after their rider. It’s a big ask!!

Lastly, when someone comes to us as an instructor and trainer, it’s not because they are happy with where they are with their riding and how the horse is working. It’s because they want to step up and ride at better level. So for us as instructors and riders, to get more from our students, we have to put pressure on our riders and get them to ask more from the horse.

The horse will nearly always protest because the quality they have been working at has been good enough, so why should they put more effort in? We have to put more pressure on the horse and push through their argument to get them to try harder and often do something they’ve never done before (for both horse and rider) and figure out what that something is.

Where this “push through” doesn’t work.

• Our horse doesn’t know how to process pressure;

• There are gaps in our horse or riders understanding of the aids;

• The horse isn’t physically ready to do more;

• There are underlying traumas (whether physical or mental) that take longer and need more support through those developmental processes.

Is your horse coping with its training? We would love to hear from you!

Submission Vs Yes

We talk a lot about submission in the horse industry. It is one of the qualities of training we are marked on.

In the dictionary, submission is defined as:

• “The action of accepting or yielding to a superior force or to the will or authority of another person”.

• “The act of allowing someone or something to have power over you”.

I don’t know about you, but this isn’t the kind of relationship that I want to have with my horse.

All my life I had been taught how to bully my horses into submission. To be bigger, scarier and stronger than my horse and anything it could be scared of.

I used to hop off at the end of a ride feeling guilty about how I had treated my horse.

Not that the way I handled them was particularly brutal or heavy handed. It just wasn’t the relationship or the experience I wanted to have with my horse. It wasn’t the relationship I had with them on the ground. I didn’t understand why that’s what I needed to get what I wanted from my horse under saddle.

As an instructor for kids and beginners, I also understood that they physically (and for the kids, mentally) were incapable of dominating a horse into submission. The lack of strength, coordination and balance in the saddle (and for the kids understanding) meant that the horses weren’t doing as they were told because they weren’t being made to.

There had to another way to get cooperation from our horses.

This is where Training Trainability came from. How can we engage our horses in the learning process so they enjoy the training sessions and want to participate?

One of our core philosophies is to ASK, not force.

Training Trainability gives the horse the opportunity to say “no”, which a lot of riders and trainers don’t agree with. This is understandable, because if you’re horse has never been given the opportunity to say no they really take advantage of it and will just about to say no to everything!! This can feel like you’re going backwards with your training and your horse is being naughty, so riders can quickly give up on doing it this way.

This method of training is about empowering the horse’s voice so:

• They choose to participate in the training, and

• They also can feel comfortable about saying that’s enough when they feel pushed to their limit mentally, physically or emotionally.

It’s about us, as trainers, to think outside the box and find motivators other than how hard we can kick, use the whip and pull on their head. It’s about developing a trust, relationship and bond with our horse, so that they want to spend time with us and look after us.

It doesn’t mean that there is no discipline and we let them walk all over us. It’s about establishing clear boundaries and expectations of behaviour so that when we work with them they are respectful and safe.

When it comes to performance pressure where we are stressing their intellect and physical condition however, we must take our time and let them say “yes” or “no” rather than expecting submission of everything we ask for.

To learn more about how to apply Trainability to your horse, click here.

Who Wouldn't Want To Train A "Bomb Proof" Horse?

Ok - so first let me preface this with:

we don’t like the terminology “bomb proof”.

Often when I see horses described as bomb proof, they are malnourished or shut down.

Even when we are working with the truly quiet horses, I believe the term bomb proof puts us in a false sense of security that increases risk of accidents happening.

My experience has been active in training horses to be beginner riding school horses, so we need to get them as quiet as we can. For me it is important to have our horses in peak mental, emotional and physical health as well as a clear understanding of what is expected of them and their cues to be considered “quiet”.

School horses are truly special horses as they need to look after riders that are unbalanced and can unintentionally hurt them when they lose their balance, don’t understand complex aids (the horse knows they can get out of work at any stage) and aren’t strong enough to “bully” them into submission.

In my experience, the quiet “bomb proof” horse isn’t created by sacking them out and desensitising them.

They are created by proving ourselves as competent and trust worthy leaders, building our horses confidence and their understanding. This can make any breed and any temperament of horse “bomb proof” - as long as we rule out other considerations such as pain, medical conditions, ill fitting gear and the like.

Outside of pain or discomfort, the reason a horse might NOT be classified as “bomb proof” include:

• The horse not understanding what is needed of them

• The horse can’t do what we are asking of them

• The horse does not have the confidence in themselves (or their rider) that they are safe/will be kept safe, and this can include any past traumatic experiences.

• The horse does not understand how pressure is being used as a tool of communication. (This often starts with the rider/trainer not understanding the timing of pressure/release for the horse to understand it)

• The horse doesn’t feel understood. (This is the most common issue I see. Our horses try to communicate with us what they need and we often miss the subtle cues and the horse ends up overreacting and being considered dangerous)

• The rider/trainer not knowing when to back off and when to push for more, or expecting too much of the horse

These principles are our guiding factors in establishing the training that Equestrian Movement offers in our online courses:

• First do no harm. Ensure that any of the training you are doing moving forward is of no detriment to the horse.

• Create a safe and stable learning and living environment.

• Create a relationship with our horse where they trust us that not only will we not hurt them but we also won’t put them in a situation where they could be hurt.

• Teach them how to learn and understand what we want.

• Teach them how to process their emotions and think rather than react.

• Teach them confidence

• Make learning fun

• Make moving fun

• Make being ridden fun

Curious to know how we do this? We cover all these in our course Training Trainability.

Poor Acceptance of Bit Pressure? 5 Things You NEED to Consider

“My horse is behind the vertical”

“My horse is behind the bit”

“My horse is reacting badly when I apply rein pressure - help!”

These are comments we see regularly on horse forums, in lessons or even when you start typing into google!

Horse’s don’t wake up one morning and decide to not do something. They do, however, try to communicate discomfort and confusion the only way they can - through behaviour.

But what could it mean for you if your horse is showing these behaviours?

1. Dental Issues

Check whether your horse is coming, due or overdue for his or her next dentist visit. These symptoms above may be simply caused by discomfort or pain, and is something your dentist can help you with.

2. Saddle Fit

Believe it or not, an incorrectly fitted saddle can create pain and tension that reverberates through the shoulders, the poll and eventually the jaw. Simple movement restriction and tension can create poor receptiveness to your aids, or can create poor posture, resulting in the horse ducking out behind the bit.

3. Body pain

As with a poorly fitted saddle, body pain, even that of the back legs, can translate into bit evasion. Remember - our entire body is connected, so when one area is not working well, it will influence the rest of the body. Seek out advice from your professional body worker.

4. Bridle & Bit Fit

Is the bridle correctly placed? Is the nose band too tight? Does the bit move around in the mouth? Are you using the right bit for your horse? (having just been to a bit fitting session, that is a whole other topic that needs more professional advise!). These could all be reasons that your horse reacts negatively to any changes to the bit pressure. Make sure to use someone qualified to ensure your horse has the right bit, and that all the bridle and associated parts are not causing undue pain or cutting off circulation of the major vessels.

5. Training

Finally, if your horse is displaying these behaviours, consider the training that has gone into that horse. Does the horse actually know what you mean when you apply rein or bit pressure? Have they learnt to duck behind the bit to get out of working correctly? Work with a reputable trainer, or sign up to learn about our Green-to-Self-Carriage course.

These Exercises Are Too Easy - Surely They Can’t Work?

So many times my students will feel like they are stuck on the easy exercises for too long.

Or I will give them exercises to practice, with the feedback that they are too easy and so didn’t think they would work.

Why is it in our nature as humans that it must feel like its hard for us to feel like we are improving?!?

The fact that they are easy exercises is exactly the point.

Over the years I have striven to be better by riding over the bigger jumps and doing the harder movements and thinking that my horse and I were improving because we were doing the hard stuff.

After years of working with hundreds of different horses and students I’ve learnt however doing the easy stuff often and really, really well, makes the hard stuff easy and natural.

And isn’t that truly what we want?

The training scale is supposed to be a natural progression of training and movement. While learning a new skill, refining and developing your feel and quality is hard, but the actual transition should smooth.

If you feel like you’re butting your head agains the wall and getting nowhere, rather than pushing for more, you should be looking for gaps in your horses and your own understanding and communication. If you are trying to progress and the movement falls apart, you need to spend time building condition in the easier movement, so it is not such a huge leap to execute the new movement.

We can also get the feeling that because we can already do something, we are ready for the next thing.

Is Walk, Stop & Back Up too easy an exercise, when it consistently re-establishes boundaries and respect?

Rather than achieving something and then saying “What’s next?”, we should want to achieve something and say “How can I do this better?”

I can guarantee you that the person that rides a halt transition after 1 week of practice, compared to the person who has been practising and perfecting for a year, compared to the person who has been practising and perfecting for 20 years, will have comparable different experiences of how well they can execute the aid. And even the person who has been practising and perfecting for 20 years will have gaps in their understanding compared to the person who has been doing it for 40 years.

This is why at Equestrian Movement we focus on the journey with our horse more so than the destination.

It doesn’t mean you can’t fulfil your grand dreams of what you want to achieve with your horse, it just means that the time frame comes second to the quality. Patience is our first skill to learn.

Repetition is good for our horse. It is how they learn.

Some horses, the more fast thinking, intelligent ones don’t like repetition so we have to think outside the box and figure out how we can practice the same exercise in different ways to get the repetition in. But overall horses learn through consistency, follow through and repetition. Exactly the way we do.

We don’t send our kids to school and expect them to know the alphabet in the first day, week or month and then expect them to be able to spell! So why do we expect our horses to understand the language of legs, seat and hands straight away and to do it perfectly every time?

Repetition wires the brain and establishes language and understanding.

Another reason why we like to use easy exercises is because we can’t establish ourselves as good leaders when we are challenging ourselves.

Have you ever tried something new that was harder and everything fell apart and your horse took advantage of it and started being “naughty”? I bet you have!

Your horse needs a strong, capable, competent leader and when you are trying something new that you don’t know how to do, you come across to your horse as incompetent. Because, well you are! At that particular exercise.

Whenever this happens in our training we must strip back to something easy to re-establish ourselves as competent leaders that our horse can confidently take direction from, before challenging ourselves again. Whether that be that ride, next ride, a week from now or a month or a year. We have to be able to leave our ego at the hitching rail each and every ride and do what is best for our horse.

So if the exercise seems too easy and too repetitive theirs a good chance it is exactly what you need to be right now.

Discover the easy, repeatable and reusable exercises that are the very foundation of any training you do

Click here to view the course

How To Stop Your Horse Spooking

Our horses mostly are prey animals, creatures of flight. Their instinct is to run first think later. To understand how the different breeds react to scary stimuli read our article … This is a survival mechanism bred into them over years of evolution and now we are trying to redirect that behaviour to make them safe for mounts for anyone to ride.

The old school method and train of thought is to shut them down, something akin to learned helplessness. Essentially we try to be bigger and scarier than anything else so they are more scared to react to their environment than they are of the scary thing in their environment. This can work for the more experienced riders but not for less experienced riders.

Just hold on and clock up the ks. Another way to desensitise and settle a spooky horse is to just expose them to a bunch of different environments and stimuli until the stop being scared. Again this requires an experienced professional rider. Done by a novice the horse can end up more scared because the rider is scared and so now it thinks it has a legitimate reason to be scared!!

What we teach at equestrian movement is getting the horse to be curious about what its scared of. This is helpful for a few different reasons.

• We can’t desensitise a horse to everything. This means that each time our horse encounters something new we have to go through the whole desensitisation process with that object. However, if we teach them to be curious about things they are scared of, so that it doesn’t matter what they are scared of -they know how to approach it and deal with it.

• Even the most beginner riders can work on teaching curiosity and create a calm, relaxed horse.

• It creates a good relationship with the rider and establishes trust and confidence in their rider over the long term.

• It can be a fun exercise to break up their training regime to keep them going sour on their work

• Your horse becomes safe for trails and if you are unsure you know what to do to best handle your horse when it becomes nervy and spooky.

Would you like to learn how to make your horse curious? We have an excellent mini-course dedicated to just that - click here to learn more!

Why Does My Horse?

“Why does my horse?”

This was the very first horse book I got as a child. Mainly because my second horse was quite difficult and I always fell off him!!!

And so began a lifelong pursuit of trying to figure out why horses did a particular thing and how to fix it.

And I eventually came up with the answer…

I was asking the wrong question!

 

It is near impossible to know why our horse behaves a certain way.

We often don’t have a horse for their whole life and don’t know what has happened to them with previous owners. Even if we know their life long experiences we don’t know everything that happens to them in the paddock every fall they have, every fight they get into with another horse, every bump and bruise they take. If we send them away to a trainer, we hope they are doing the right thing by them but can never be sure exactly how they were handled. Knowing why your horse is spooking can’t ever truly, thoroughly be answered but asking “how best can I support my horse?” can.

1. Rule out any good reasons your horse has for misbehaving.

Ensure saddle and bridle is professionally fitted. Get teeth checked and kept up to date. Invest in a good farrier. Work with a body worker that has an excellent reputation but then also go with your gut whether you are happy with their work. I have had horses become worse for working with a lot of different chiropractors. If in doubt get your vet to check.

2. Make sure they understand how to process stimuli correctly.

Horses learn from the release of pressure not the application and often they don’t know what to do with pressure and can over react. Ensuring you have taught your horse how to learn from pressure cues keeps them calm throughout the learning process.

3. Be a leader, not a bully boss

Ensure that you are showing up as a good leader by setting clear boundaries and following through on your asks, ESPECIALLY in stressful and difficult situations. This is when your horse needs you the most and how you show up when they are not handling the situation well is the best way a horse will decide if you are worth being the herd leader.

4. Make your horse confident

Teach them confidence through curiosity. A horses flight instinct is self preservation and to get away from what is scary. To create a bold, confident horse we want them to be curious not scared of new things.

5. Prevent them from going sour by changing their exercises and environments.

Repeating the same task every day in the same environment will set both you and your horse up to fail by making them sour on their work. If your going to work on the same task change the environment. If you are going to work in the same environment change the task so it seems like each training session you are doing something new and fresh.

6. Prevent them from going sore by ensuring you’re conditioning them for soundness.

Riding for a certain look or skill isn’t necessarily always in the best interest of their musculoskeletal health and soundness. It is important to understand why you are doing certain exercises and how to use them so they make your horse more sound rather than to achieve a certain look or skill.

You can learn how to correctly apply training techniques (steps 2-5) by following our Training Trainability Online Course - available now! (click here to learn more)

Interested in conditioning your horse correctly? Pre-register for our Green to Self Carriage Course, due for release August 2019. Click here.

The Importance of Trust With Your Training

Does your horse trust you?

Trust has in important aspect in your training - it determines whether or not you are going to have a willing horse or a resistant horse.

And a resistant horse isn’t always the horse that is being ‘naughty’. A resistant horse is usually a scared horse, or a shut down horse (read how to identify a shut down horse here).

When we focus on building trust with our horses, it leads to a horse that is willing to work with us, because it trusts that should anything be really scary or dangerous, you will keep it safe.

It is unfortunate that so many trainers expect that EVERY horse will do EVERYTHING they throw that horses way - without spending the time building up a level of trust. That may be fine for some horses but for others it just leads to a meltdown. If that meltdown is shown externally, the horse is deemed crazy or dangerous. If the meltdown is kept internal, the horse is labelled bombproof and sent on it’s way - usually to a home that ends up having to fix all the problems that then follow (or being rehomed again and again until someone either identifies the issues and works to fix them or the horse is sent to the doggers).

Spending time working on trust is one of the most important things you can ever do for the safety and longevity of your horse.

Develop trust and other foundation training skill in our Training Trainability Program

Click here to view the course

Are You Causing Your Horse To Shut Down?

Horses are natural flight animals - their first instinct is to run first, think later.

The old school mentality of breaking a horse is to break the horses spirit, so that it forfeits its’ life to you. Your horse is then more scared of you than anything else and so chooses to figure out what you want from it rather than run away.

A lot of breakers will say that your horse isn’t safe until you sack them out.

What they are talking about is desensitising. I have done desensitising and sacking out with plenty of horses and here is my problem. You are giving them no other option but to let you do scary things to them and in the process WE ARE GIVING THEM NO TOOLS TO DEAL WITH THEIR FEARS AND EMOTIONS. The ones that don’t thrive with this style of training are deemed mentally unsound and untrainable.

In this environment it is very easy to shut down your horse -especially if you are also using forceful techniques as well.

When a horse shuts down it stops reacting to stimuli all together. This doesn’t mean that your horse is calm and relaxed, understands what to do and isn’t scared. It doesn’t mean that your horse is brave and confident and trying to look after you. It DOES mean your horse has learnt that if it doesn’t move when the scary thing is there, the scary thing goes away.

The second problem with this is that you have to reteach it for EVERY SCARY OBJECT.

Just because you have taught your horse to stand still to drape the tarp over it, doesn’t mean that it knows to then stand still for the flappy bag or the umbrella or the pram and then all the new things it will experience when you take it out. You have to reteach it for every scary object that it reacts to, to stand still while you move it over there body.

For some horses, once you have touched them with the object that they are scared of this process works - they are no longer scared.

But a horse that has shut down has dissociated from the experience. It is overwhelmed by fear and knows to just stand still. So it stands tense and rigid. There is only so much this horse can cope with before it hits its breaking point and loses it, leaving the handler wondering “where the hell did that come from?”. This horse hasn’t learnt not to be scared - it has just learnt not to react.

In either case, both of these horses previously mentioned horses have not been taught how to process fear and emotion. Both of these horses haven’t learnt not to react to scary things. Both of these horses haven’t developed confidence and trust.

That is why at Equestrian Movement we teach CURIOSITY instead.

Teaching curiosity works for even the most timid and sensitive horses.

• It teaches them to trust us.

• It teaches them how to be brave and confident.

• It teaches them how to handle objects and situations that they are scared of without just trying to run away.

• It teaches them how to investigate things that are scary.

• Most importantly, eventually they learn how to look after their human.

Would you like to teach your horse to be curious? You can find this and so much more (including communication and leadership, critical to the building of trust in your horse) in our Holistic Horse Handling Program.

Click here for more information about the Program