Is Your Horse Fitter Than You?

One of the common issues I see as a horse riding instructor is that my students horses are stronger, fitter and more powerful than they are. Well, let's truly be honest, when you are working with 500kg plus animals, they are more than likely going to at least be stronger and more powerful than you, if not fitter. Even if it is a 300kg animal you don't really want them to know how much stronger than you they are. I laugh when people talk about dogs being too strong for them to handle, which are at their heaviest 50 - 100kg, but which is still obviously a significant weight.

The key is not to be bigger or stronger, nor bully them into submission, but to create a channel of self expression through disciplined behaviour. Set parameters and boundaries in what you see as acceptable behaviour, follow through with consistency, and allow them to express their individuality constructively. This establishes you as the leader they want to follow and can trust instead of the dictator that they must follow or will suffer. 

One of the first goals I go about with a new student is to break down the power struggle and try to find a level of cooperation between horse and rider. I find a battle of the strongest is rarely successful because it has never worked for me let alone my students. 

Tips for establishing cooperation

Discipline

The easiest way for establishing a good working relationship is setting some boundaries and expectations. I choose to do this in a non threatening and easy to apply way. It needs to be consistent with each and every time you are handling your horse. It also needs to be done with compassion. The idea of bullying a horse into submission is dated, we don't need that for submission - in fact it works against us for true submission. Clear, well established boundaries are all that is needed. 

A horses behaviour is an expression of their personality interacting with their environment. 

How a horse reacts to an environmental stimulus is firstly defined by its' personality and secondly how it has been conditioned to react to stimulus. You can help set a standard for how you want your horse to work with you but you cannot 'make them behave'.

Consistency is the key.

If no matter how the horse behaves you react with calm, compassionate boundaries for what is acceptable and what is not, you are not only teaching your horse how you want them to behave you are also showing them through your demeanour. You can unintentionally set in action a cascade of poor behaviour if you:

·        React emotionally

·        Don't clearly define the behaviour you expect (or don't know what behaviour you should expect)

·        Don't follow through on these expectations

·        Are inconsistent with setting these boundaries

·        Allow other horses or people dictate that horses behaviour more frequently than you

Developing a relationship with your horse

This is a tricky one. You don't develop a relationship with a horse in a day, or a week, or a month. You establish it over a lifetime. Every interaction positive or negative is affecting your relationship with your horse. How you react in difficult and stressful situations teaches your horse whether or not they can trust and rely on you. How you guide your horse through difficult times is the crux of your relationship with your horse.

This is where having clear, established boundaries really come into their own. If you have established your expectations in a non-stressful, relaxed environment, followed through on these expectations to the reward, you can quickly and easily define your expectations in a stressful and over stimulated environment, channel the excess energy into focused energy and positively work through the situation. This then also reinforces your good leadership skills and the horses' trust in you to make good decisions for their well being.

You can actively take control of a situation that makes your horse uncomfortable and navigate them through to a positive resolution. Each time you can do this you are strengthening your relationship and your horses trust in you, your trust in your horse and your confidence in yourself to work through difficult situations with your horse. 

Know your why 

What is your why? This is an important part of your relationship with your horse.

If your why is at the detriment of the mental, physical or emotional health of your horse you are breaking their trust in you and breaking down your relationship. However if you are providing just the right amount of mental and physical stimulation to make them feel confident and good in themselves they will willing work with you in the development of their training.

Take the time to define why you are dedicating countless hours of work, training and money towards your riding. If your why is to get recognition or get a ribbon at a certain competition, this can mean that you compromise your horses physical, mental or emotional well-being and they will know what you are doing is not in their best interest. If you can confidently say your horses mental, emotional and physical well being is your primary objective the rest will come. Your horse will feel good for the mental and physical stimulation and will actively engage in their training with you. Best case scenario they will also look after you and teach you - if you are willing to listen and learn.

Level up your skills

"Take a small step, normalise the behaviour, level up, never miss 2 in a row" Darren Rowse

Sometimes in training we are aimlessly shooting for the stars without a strategy of how to get there. It is important to dream big but your goals get a lot harder to achieve without a solid strategy.

Define the first thing you can do to work towards the big goal today and do it! Do it until it is a normal part of your routine. "Its just what I do." Work on that goal for 3 months until it is properly integrated into your routine and don't compromise this small goal more twice in a row. You will also be experiencing an ebb and flow between your horse being one step ahead of you and you being one step ahead of your horse. Keep working on improving your skill set. Understand the foundations and continue to revisit. Ride anything and everything you can. 

"You can't steer a ship 50 degrees at once, but if you move 2 degrees, then another 2 degrees and continue like this, years later you end up in a very different place from where you began. As long as you are steering in the right direction, your impact and progress is made over time" Illy

Get fit, get a strong core and get balanced in the saddle

If you want to be fit enough for your horse you need control of your core for an independent seat. You gotta get loose if you want to dance. One thing that I notice about my own riding (and I will be honest in this - it was so hard for me to learn but it was huge in getting me to where I am today): 

You have to be able to balance and move independent of your horse if you want to be a competent rider with a sticky seat. I have memories of YEARS worth of lessons with my instructors trying to teach me how to influence my horses movement with my seat and I just remember thinking this is impossible, there is no way I can do that and so relied on control of the horse with reins instead of creating an integration of movement through a cohesion of our bodies working together.

The thing I eventually learnt is that you had to let go of control to gain control. Trying to control the horses by griping and tensing is simply ineffective when you are trying to dance. Secondly I had to teach my body to be more sensitive to the subtleties of my horses movement. If I could only feel big shifts and evasions and imbalances then I would only be able to counter-correct movement. When I learnt to pay attention to each stride and each flex of a muscle I learnt how to get control of my seat and work with the horse with my seat. 

Make sure your horse isn't fitter than you

Don't lunge your horse 3 times a week if you are unfit and don't have the time to ride. You are only making your horse fitter and stronger than you are. It is better for your horse to be unfit and out of work than to try and keep them fit and not yourself. Optimally it would be great if you could both be fit together that would be ideal but life happens and that means sometimes we have to negotiate on a few things. The first to go is generally our self care. 

Equestrian Movement is passionate about self care and optimal health and believe it is pivotal to being an effective horse rider. We are athletes and you need to treat yourself as such.

Is your horse fitter than you?

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Are you riding for now or forever?

The glory of horse riding is felt by many. But are you riding for now or forever?

The question I pose is pretty obvious – of course we want to ride forever. Right Now.

But I put it to you this way. What is your ultimate goal with horse riding?

Do you want to enjoy the luxury of the wind in your hair as you gallop through the paddocks? Perhaps you dream of taking gold at the Olympics? Or maybe, you are in it for the love and partnership of the horse.

There are no wrong answer to your desired goal, but there is a right and a wrong way to achieve it.

One of my desires with riding and horsemanship has been to compete at pony club dressage. Maybe even take home a ribbon. Not grandiose, given, but still, it's my goal.

I could choose to achieve this in one of two ways:

1)      Now, or

2)      Later

If I choose now, I could easily take my boyo to a  test, place him in an award winning frame that looks like self carriage and take away the prize. But the simple fact is that right now he isn’t physically capable of maintaining that frame, even for short spurts, in a healthy manner. His previous training means he will instantly arch his neck when I ask, but he can't engage his core or hind end when he does.

If I choose later, I have time to develop his musculoskeletal system to be able to support true self carriage. I still can take him to dressage tests, but the expectation is not for prizes, but for improvement. It will take months, nay years, before I would hope to win a ribbon.

Choosing the now may result in my win, but will end up my horse’s loss.

I choose later.

I choose to work with my horse to improve his physical capabilities at a pace that will allow true musculoskeletal developments.

I choose a partnership of growth and development based on true trust and honest, hardcore work.

I choose to let my horse win his physical achievements before I win a ribbon.

I choose forever.

What will you choose?

Sarah

6 Reasons to Train Straightness in your Horse

Straightness is a term that is thrown around a lot in riding. But what is it, and why should we be using exercises to encourage it?

Horses can’t actually travel straight. Watch the way that a dog runs and you will notice that its haunches travel to one side. This is the same for horses, because their shoulders are narrower than their hindquarters. When a horse travels “straight” in the paddock it is normally when they are “prancing” the movement isn’t particularly controlled - they are in a state of excitement with their tail and head in the air snorting. Not exactly what we want to be riding.

What straightness means under saddle is that the parts of their body that they typically go crooked or collapse through are stacked on top of each other evenly. Like if we were to stand square with our feet under hips, our shoulders stacked on top of our hips and then our head squarely on our shoulders in a relaxed stance we would be “straight”. “Crooked” would be if we stepped on foot in or out a bit further, dropped or twisted through the hips, leant a shoulder forward, kinked through the waist or neck, twisted our head and the like.

Of course this can only happen in theory because we have our own structural strengths and weaknesses and will find effort from one side easier than the other. This is seen in doing squats where we can push stronger off one leg than the other or in yoga where we can stretch deeper into a pose on one side than the other. The ultimate goal of straightness is to strengthen our weak muscles and supple our strong or tense muscles to create tone. And this is our life long journey of developing straightness in both ourselves and our horses.

When the integrity of our straightness is lost we are more inclined to injury and pain. The joints don’t stack well on top of each other along our vertebrae and limbs, this stresses the cushions between the joints, the ligaments and tendons attached to stabilize the joints and the muscles. It also increases risk of damage to the nerve and pinching of the nerve because the vertebrae house very vulnerable nerve bundles that communicate throughout the body. Increased “crookedness” also puts more stress on the bones and increases risk of bone conditions like arthritis, splints, fractures and the like because of increased concussion.”

Horses, very much like people, develop "Crooked" - a preference to  weight bear through one hind more than the other, twist through the hips and pelvis more one way than the other, lean onto one shoulder more than the other, turn their head more one way than the other and so on. Most horses are strong and straight to the right and weak and supple to the left, which may actually have something to do with the way they curl in the womb. In addition we need to consider the contribution of their breeding and confirmation. For example a naturally supple thoroughbred may find their weak side is stronger because their suppleness is actually their strength.

So what are the reasons to train for straightness, if your horse naturally develops crooked?

1. Your riding will be more balanced

When a horse is encouraged to work straight, it will make it easy for you to be more balanced. When a horse is on the forehand they typically put you in front of the vertical, and you being in front of the vertical puts the horse more on the forehand. Same for crookedness, if your horse is dropping its hip it will make you collapse through that same hip and not distribute your weight evenly into both stirrups. You end up counter balancing each other and reinforcing, strengthening the crookedness.

2. You horse will improve his suppleness

Straightness and elasticity go hand in hand because straightness is truly the horses’ contractility power to flex complementing muscles along the length of its spine. Two factors come into consideration here. When a horse is “straight” it is because it can engage and ground its core, transfer its weight onto the haunches and take the weight of the forehand. The horses ability to engage its core and flex and squat through the haunches so that it isn’t balancing with its forehand and underneck muscles is what it needs to be able to go into long and though. So straightness training is developing the suppleness of topline the horse needs to develop a “rounded gait” and working frame.

The stronger and more grounded the core the more elastic the movement both in bend and in impulsion. Because straightness, engaged and grounded core and balance are all kind of the same thing. So the better the horse can balance and distribute weight the better and deeper they can bend without losing their balance.

When we train straightness in our horses, we are training for more suppleness as we introduce straight on curved lines, through changes of bend and transitions, into leg yield and our laterals without overdeveloping too much pelvic flexion or rotation either way, etc. The suppleness can safely be developed on both sides as the horse use both hind legs powerfully and elevates and extends through each shoulder evenly.  

3. A straight horse will have more impulsion

Impulsion is the elevation and thoroughness of the forehand where engagement is power and flexion of the hindquarters. This can happen when the horse develops his squats evenly through his hindquarters and develops enough engagement of the core that it can start lifting the forehand, rolling the shoulder blades into place so that they can extend through the shoulder with relaxation.

Impulsion, or the forward thrust of movement, happens when you have a horse using his hind quarters. A crooked horse may use one hind leg for thrust, but this is only minimally powerful as this leg is not under the hip (wide) and a little to the side, meaning it cannot be maintained (try using one leg to thrust yourself into a run - note how we push it out to the side, how quickly we tire). A balanced, straight horse is able to keep his legs direct under his hips and can use both legs to power his forward movement easily - and therefore develop strong, maintainable engagement. Once the horse starts getting into his hocks the straightness has to continue through his back with even bend left and right to lift the forehand and allow for rotation through the shoulder blades. Impulsion can then occur as the horse learns to lift and extend through each shoulder. If one shoulder develops more than the other or the horse gets deeper into one hind than the other they will lift that shoulder higher and be penalized for an irregular stride.

4. Straightness is essential for Collection

Collection can only occur once we have successfully created rhythm, relaxation, connection, impulsion and straightness. Only a horse who is familiar with and accepts the aids for straightening work can collect, due to the ability to bear more weight behind instead of swinging the hind legs to one side and elevate and extend the forehand rather than leaning into the shoulder. Straightening exercises as spoken about above (straight on a curved line, straight through changes of bend etc.) also develops the strength of conditioning the horse needs for extended periods of time in collection. The more dynamic movement we create and the more easily and fluidly a horse can transition from one exercise to the next the straighter, more evenly developed and balanced they are and the easier it is to develop and maintain collection. Collection can be developed in a crooked horse but we really start to notice the way it hinders the horses ability to move forward, fluidly without restriction, with grace and ease.  

5. You can improve the musculoskeletal health of your horse

Even if you have no desire to compete your horse in any discipline, straightness will help improve musculoskeletal soundness in your horse. A crooked horse tends to overdevelop some muscles and under-develop others. This increases muscle, tendon, and ligament strain, can change the conformation of your horse and increase the risk of joint and bone damage. Exercises in straightness can improve your horses’ happiness and comfort now and later in life - and after all, that's why we are here! A lot of the exercises we use can be applied on trails and open fields hacking out.

6. You will be less likely to get 'stuck' in parts of the training scale

The main thing holding you back where you are now from where you want to be is the condition of your horses’ musculoskeletal system, in combination with your knowledge of how to ride those movements. (You don’t know what you don’t know but that’s a story for another day). When we first introduce an exercise or movement to a horse they adapt quickly. Their constitutional strengths pick up and protect them from this movement doing damage to their body. From there they plateau while the rest of their musculoskeletal system adapts to this new stress (this can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years depending on your skill as a rider, previous injuries, how well they adapt, how well you manage protective reflexes etc). If you push them through before they are ready you compromise the integrity of their musculoskeletal condition and keep exposing them to stressors that they must keep adapting to, which results in only their strongest parts adapting to protect themselves from damage and their weaker parts are getting more and more left behind until they get an injury and need to spell.

What exercises are you using on your horse to encourage straightness? Join our membership program and access free lesson plans to help you create your strategy!

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Are You Riding A False Frame?

Are you riding a false frame?

What IS a false frame?

A false frame is when the rein aids have been used to control the flexion and angles of the neck instead of the flexion and angles of the hocks. The reins have been used to create “submission” to the bit instead of “acceptance” of the bit.

In this way the horse can have its head down in a frame - but it is still working on the forehand.

The self carriage muscles get developed incorrectly, with the horse rotating the pelvis under for “engagement” instead of transferring weight onto the haunches and getting deeper into their hocks.

This puts a lot of stress on their croup and they often will twist and collapse through the pelvis. The topline, especially behind the whither where the saddle sits, becomes weak and hyper extended from over flexing through their neck and crest instead of engaging their core and using their back muscles. When they are in a false frame they are often behind the vertical.

Your horse is not working in true self carriage.

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Signs a horse isn’t working correctly in self carriage.

The horse is swinging its head left and right as it works.

If a horse is swinging its head left and right as its working, particularly in walk and trot, the rider is see-sawing its mouth left and right to keep its head down. This works particularly well if the rider can time the pressure of the bit for when the foreleg is lifted. The horse can’t pull and resist the contact and has to put its head down.

Flexing away at the third vertebrae.

A horse in a true frame should feel like its almost pulling through the bit, but that you can half halt and rebalance them without resistance. This means they are working through to contact and flexing correctly at the pole with the pole as the highest point.

When they are working behind the vertical, flexing away at the third vertebrae, they are balanced on the forehand and just tucking their nose down, staying hollow through the back.

Bulky, bulging muscles at the top of the neck behind the pole.

These muscles show that the horse hasn’t been taught how to work in a frame with a soft relaxed jaw and gullet. It will have its mouth clamped down on the bit and against the bit.

This means they can’t correctly flex or bend and have had their head held in flexion - which isn’t true flexion.

To get bend the rider will be yielding the shoulders out/displacing the shoulders so to get the horse “soft” because they won’t be able to pull into the bit this way. You will also sometimes see the horses swinging their head left and right as well.

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Just because a horse has its head down doesn’t mean it is working correctly.

In fact a horse that has been made to work with its head down without engaging their core muscles correctly will have more musculoskeletal problems then a horse that is worked hollow.

It is important that if you are wanting to take the physical soundness of your horse into consideration that you can identify horses that are working in a false frame or are using themselves correctly, rather than just “are they working in a frame or not”. This will give you the best tools to know which techniques work and who to ask advice from - and who is doing it just for show and accolades.

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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

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HELP! I'm Afraid To Canter!

Are you afraid to canter?

Most people at some stage of their riding career will go through a period of being too scared to canter.

Mine happened when I was 8 years old and I had my first fall.

It. Was. A. Doozy!

I was riding the old faithful of the riding school and we were doing games. I was cantering down the straight when, (and totally out of character for old faithful, Thomas) he turned into a bronco. He bucked me over his head and I landed on my head and flipped onto my back.

After that, it was a whole year before I cantered again. I remember every lesson being asked if I would canter that lesson and being terrified and sitting it out. Eventually, I worked up the nerve and started cantering again but it took a whole year for me to try.

 My second horse was also particularly good at bucking me off. It got too a point where I was too scared to ride him. We ended up sending him to an old bushy who spent a couple months working with him - but he said he was an absolute gem for him. At the same time, he would take me out on the weekends riding my horse while I rode his old faithful. Again I was terrified. I was so used to my horse bucking going up and down hills and basically any other given opportunity that I was terrified even on his horse.

My game changer?

My mum bought we a stock saddle for my horse. This meant that each time he bucked the wings kept me in the saddle and I was able to stay on, pull his head up. Eventually, I got really good at sitting bucks and pulling horses heads up!! It was a handy skill to develop to become a horse trainer. These days however, I prefer to not let my horses know they can be broncos.

What can go wrong with the canter.

Cold backed

If your horse is cold backed, the first canter few canter transitions is when your horse will buck.

The canter has natural scope and roundedness to it - whereas the movement of the walk and trot is flat and straight.

A horse can warm up hollow and flat in the walk and trot, and when this happens the first canter transition pulls over his topline and can trigger bucking in a cold backed horse. After the first few canters this should settle down and they can transition into canter without bucking.

This can be avoided by making sure the back is well warmed up before the canter and engaging the self carriage muscles correctly.

Need support with your riding? Check out our video course and exercise program focusing on improving your seat.

Rushing in the canter.

The longer the horse stays in canter the more on the forehand, rushed and unbalanced they get.

This can mean they pick up more and more momentum and it can feel like they are out of control. In this unbalanced, rushing canter it can be hard to pull up or turn the horse.

Often inexperienced riders will hang onto the horses mouth. If you are riding an ex pacer or race horse this actually encourages them to go faster and “take the bolt”.

You can correct this by spending lots of time on getting your horse to think “halt” & “rein back” in the walk from bit contact. Once you are ready to reintroduce the canter, spend time initially riding back to trot as soon as you’re in canter, then extending the canter for short periods before trotting again. Keep testing your brakes and riding back to the trot before the horse picks up too much momentum will help avoid the rushing, and the fear associated with it.

Stumbling.

The roundedness and scope of the canter can make horses more prone to trip and stumble if they are leaning heavily on the bit and not using themselves properly.

This can be improved by only doing short periods of canter, transitions into canter over the pole and making sure your horse isn’t on the forehand and leaning on the bit, especially in half halts and downward transitions.

Final Tip

The more established your seat is in canter the more confident you will be.

So if you are really struggling with your horse in canter a great way to improve your confidence is to go to a riding school and get some private lessons purely focusing on your seat in canter.

Periods of canter without the stirrups, transitions into and out of canter without stirrups and 2 point seat in canter for periods of time will all do wonders for your balance and confidence in canter.

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.

6 Reason You May Be Stumbling Through Your Ride (And What You Can Do About It)

A horse that stumbles can give us quite a momentary shock, but when your horse stumbles regularly, we need to start looking into the root of the issue. Here are a few reasons why your horse might stumble and what you can do to help.

Training

A horse that is riding hollow with his head high is unbalanced and on the forehand, and may stumble more frequently. Same can be said for a horse that is leaning on the bit like a fifth leg, as soon as the pressure on the bit is released they may stumble, which is their attempt to avoid faceplanting in the dirt.

The fix

Ensure you use the correct exercises for true self-carriage. If you horse is unable to engage his core, go back down the training scale and start again.

Conformation

Some horses are born with abnormal conformations, especially in the legs, may be more prone to stumbling than others.

The fix

There may not actually be a fix for this, but ensure you horse has the best self-carriage training to minimise the issues. It is also worth consulting with your chiropractor to see if there are any physio exercises to improve the issue.

Injuries

Current injuries may create pain and result in limping and stumbling as a result. Also, past injuries, particularly long-recovering ones to the hips, shoulders, legs or feet, may have put the horse off balance as they favoured the injured side.

The fix

For current injuries, rest, recovery and possible farrier/veterinary attention are recommended. For previous injuries, have a chat to your chiropractor.

Fitness

A horse that is not fit will tire quickly and stumble. A horse that is also pushed to his fitness limit will tire and stumble.

The fix

Recognise the level of fitness of your horse. Identify when you start to feel him tire and allow him to rest. Gradually increase his fitness by extending his training to the point where he is just starting to tire then allow rest again.

Arthritis

Horses with arthritis will tend to be less able to move the joints fluidly or less comfortable fully weight-bearing on one limb over others, and can lead to stumbling.

The fix

Unfortunately arthritis cannot be cured, but we can alleviate the pain with good supplementation or under veterinary advice. Also ensure you use gentle warm up exercise (this may take longer than other horses) and train for self-carriage. Regular gentle exercise is a must as is regular rest. You can read our article on how to manage arthritis here.

Hoof Maintenance

Hooves that are poorly maintained or too long can create stumbling issues.

The fix

Maintain regular farrier visits. Ensure the farrier is cutting to the right length and angle. If you are unsure or unhappy with your farrier, seek a second opinion.

What is a Quirky Rider? Find Out if it is You!

The quirky horse rider is the person who rides to develop themselves and not to prove themselves. The quirky rider sees their relationship with their horse as an evolution of who they are and uses the lessons learnt in the saddle to better understand themselves, their relationships and their purpose at a soul level. They apply the lessons they learn from the horses to their everyday life and see each trial and tribulation with their horse as a way to develop their strength of character and better define their ethos and purpose. 

The quirky rider accepts every challenge faced with faith and determination to see it through and understand that no matter the result, they are where they need to be at this very moment in time. They whole heartedly love their horse and understand that their behaviour is an expression of their personality that is not to be squashed and dominated but encouraged to flourish and grow. 

The quirky rider understands that there is a deeper meaning to be understood in their relationship with their horse and their horses actions. They take the time to reflect what their horse is trying to communicate in its actions and how best to integrate their riding goals with their horses personality.

The moment I became a quirky rider

This moment is burnt into my memory forever. For a while I was embarrassed about my actions, but I vowed from here on out I would always be the voice for my horse and not let anyone pressure me into doing anything to my horse that I thought would be disrespectful or that would offend them.

At the time I had a good relationship with my instructor, I had learnt so much from her and she was the person who built up my skills to be an instructor and a EA competent competitor. I respected her advice and took her word as gospel. At the time I was riding a stallion who wasn't always the most well behaved but had a heart of gold, a beautiful nature and mostly tried his heart out, occasionally deciding that the arena was terrifying and not concentrating on anything other than spooking for the length of the arena. She taught me to be a strong and heavy handed rider, she taught me that was what I needed to be to ride a stallion. Something deep inside me knew this was wrong, but I respected her judgement and worked as she asked me. When I look back now I know what was lacking was not my strength as a rider but my communication skills. He wasn't trying to be naughty, he just didn't know what I wanted, I didn't really understand what I wanted. As our lessons went on, more and more I pretended to be doing what she asking me without trying to do it because it felt so wrong. One of our lessons I vividly remember being taught to run him into the wall of the arena to get counter flexion. I let her push me to keep running him into the wall until he yielded off my outside leg. Bless him he figured it out, through no help from me he learnt to yield off my outside leg so as not to be run into the wall. I have to make mention that this is also one of the gentler instructors I've had in my riding career. I have definitely been pushed by instructors to do a lot worse to my horses. 

One day, mid lesson, I can't remember what we were bullying him into, there were so many things we bullied him into, but this was the day I stopped and said to my instructor there had to be a better way. She told me I was unteachable and walked out. I was in shock, I had just lost my mentor, my coach and my inspiration. It all fell down around me but I knew in my heart I had done the right thing for me and the right thing for my horse. This was the day I vowed to always stand up and be my horses voice because he could not. This was the day I vowed to understand his behaviour instead of bullying him into what was expected of him to perform like a circus animal. This was the day I said I would find a better way whether someone was able to show me the way or not and so I started to listen to my horse. I discovered that when I wasn't trying to bully him into submission he was actually a very good teacher. He knew better than any instructor what was in his best interest, what made his body feel good when it worked and what didn't and I let him tell me when he didn't understand what I wanted. Sure our competition quality suffered temporarily but only because I went back to square one and decided to relearn the whole training process as taught by the horse. I loved this little dude, he opened my heart and my mind to a better way of training and he is the foundation for how I ride today. I'm still a working progress and each horse teaches me something new, but I always allow myself to be the voice of a misunderstood horse first and a trainer second. 

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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

Snug as a Bug in a Rug - 13 Tips for Rugging Your Horse

It’s starting to get a little chilly in Australia.

Yes, it actually reached below 10 degrees celcius in Queensland - time to pull out the thermals!

But what about your horse?

Here are a few tips to help you manage your rugging.

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• Your rugs should be chosen for seasonality first, fit and comfort second, then finally price and looks.

• You will likely need more than one type of rug per horse, and possibly even two that offer the same level of protection (in case one is torn or needs washing).

• This handy guide (sourced from thegroomslist.co.uk) may help as a guide for your selection but is a guide only.

sourced: thegroomslist.co.uk

• Keep an eye on the weather app to help make your mind up about which rugs should be used when. Also handy to have a thermometer outside of the stables or tack shed to assess the ambient temperature locally.

• Each horse will need a different level of rugging depending on the season, activity, age, body condition and living arrangements (stabling, clipping etc), so don’t assume that because your neighbours horse has 3 layers, so should yours.

• Don’t go throwing on the heaviest rug you can find as soon as it starts to turn cold (unless it is a freaky frozen snap) – your horse will probably be too hot to start and then have nothing to upgrade to when it gets colder.

• Don’t assume your horse is hot just because you are – did they just spend the last 30 minutes getting sweaty mucking out their yard?

• To assess if your horse is too hot, put your hand inside the neck of the rug and feel just behind the wither. If it is wet, your horse is too hot. Do not go by the warmth of their legs or ears.

• To assess if your horse is too cold, put your hand inside the neck of the rug and feel just behind the wither. If it is a bit chilly, your horse could possibly use another layer. Also look for hair standing up – just like us when we get goosebumps.

• An underconditioned horse (too skinny, or lost muscle mass) is going to need more carefully controlled temperature with their rugging to avoid expending excess energy attempting to keep warm.

• Rugs, like our blanket, will need regular maintenance and replacement. Imagine if you ran around with your doona wrapped around you for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 3 months of the year. It will soon lose its fill and comfort.

sourced: http://www.ekonomikmobilyacarsisi.com/rugs/how-to-measure-a-horse-for-a-rug/

• To estimate your horses rug size, you can measure from the centre of the chest, around the outside of the widest part of the shoulder, to the buttocks in a line parallel with the ground (see diagram).

• A correctly fitted rug should sit above the shoulders on the neck, with the tail flap located at the tail base, the chest buckles on the first or second hole, the leg buckles loose enough not to chafe but not too loose to swing, and the surcingle buckling with a hands width to the belly.

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

To Clip Or Not To Clip?

As winter (in the southern hemisphere, anyway) approaches, many of our horses are becoming fluffier and hairier, and to thus we pose the following question: should we clip them?

There are many advantages and disadvantages to consider, so we have listed them below to help you decide!

PRO - CLIPPING

Easier grooming

Outside of the clip itself, general grooming becomes a lot less difficult and can be a time saver at tacking up. Saving time becomes even more important when our sunlight is restricted, so why not?

Less hair in the washing machine

Have you ever had that time when you forgot to rinse the washing machine after doing a load of saddle blankets or rugs? Your clothes wore more hair than your horse did, I’m betting. So for those of us who don’t have the luxury of a horse-only washing machine, or even those of us that do, it will reduce the cleaning required and general wear-and-tear on your machine.

It is possible your horse may itch less

I have had many experiences with dogs that constantly itch without having an underlying skin condition. It blew my mind that simply by regularly clipping them, they significantly reduced in itchiness!

While there is no science backing this, and while I haven’t seen it in practice on an itchy horse, could it work? Possibly. Before you reach for the clippers though, be sure you have ruled out underlying health conditions, as some of these may be contagious and you could spread it to other horses via the clippers!

There are a variety of clip styles to try

Depending on your discipline or personal inclination, there are a variety of clips you could try - potentially a different one for each year! There are some clipper artists that take a unique approach and use the horse as a canvas for their design… I’ll let you form your own opinion on that though.

Con - Clipping

You will need to rug more

Not only will you need to rug more, you need to be prepared to change their rugs more consistently - especially in climates like Queensland (Australia), where winter consists of evenings around 5 degrees Celsius and days in the mid twenties.

You may need to hire a professional

Some people either lack the confidence, skill or knowledge to clip. So if you don’t want your horse looking like you dragged them through the hedge backwards, you may have to consider hiring a professional to do the job for you - several times throughout the season.

Your horse may not like the clippers

Some horses are terrified of the sound or vibration of the clippers. It takes a very confident and well trained horse (hey - check out our Training Trainability course that you can apply the principles of to this very situation!), or you may have to opt to sedate your horse.

Not only can sedation have side effects (including becoming overly excitable, anaphylaxis, or collapse), it is an additional cost to consider as it should ONLY EVER be administered by a veterinarian (mostly, for the above mentioned reasons).

Older horses need the additional warmth

Older horses, particularly if they experience joint pain, or have muscle wastage, have less capability of self-regulating their warmth, and therefore need additional warmth from their own coat, without the added layers and weights of multiple rugs. If you do have to clip your older horse, ensure they stay warm and comfortable by considering lighter weight but warmer rug options and regularly checking how they are responding to the level of warmth applied.

So there you have it - the pros and cons of clipping your horse. What are you doing this winter?

What It Means When Your Horse Is Licking Or Chewing During Training

Is licking or chewing during training a sign of stress or relaxation?

I’m going to throw my 2 cents in on this debate #yourewelcome.

Licking can indicate your horse may have reached its’ coping limits with your training.

I believe it is a sign of both. 

If you’re horse is actively showing signs of relaxation than one would have to think that first it needs to be stressed, to release the stress and show exaggerated signs of relaxation. Right? So my thought is that it is actually a sign of learning and processing what they were working on. 

There’s no doubt about the fact that we create stress when working our horses. We create physical stress to condition their body, mental stress to grow their intellect and emotional stress to increase resilience to their environment. If we create just the right amount of stress they grow and develop. If we create too much stress they start to protect themselves. Their body tightens up to avoid injury, they stop thinking and processing what their are learning and they shy away from challenging situations. 

So while I’m not actively seeking the licking and chewing response, it is an indication to me the pressure I had on them before they started licking and chewing is probably about their limits for coping. Any more pressure and they will not be learning any more -they will be stressed. Horses can only learn and seek the right behaviour with a relaxed brain.

Begin training your horse the CORRECT way

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Why we should be teaching our horses to be curious

You’ve seen it, right?

The horse that prances, snorts and shies on a trail ride, at a competition, or even at the trees blowing in the wind.

Maybe you have even been on that horse.

It’s not exactly a pleasant scenario to be in, and can take all our skill and energy just to keep riding.

Horses are inherently animals of prey and therefore their instinctive reaction is attuned more to flight then fight. Therefore, a horse that is ‘high strung’ or displaying those types of behaviours is nearly completely using the instinct part of the brain, which disengages the ability for the horse to be able to use the parts of the brain to think, process and learn

A moving object, different colour, change of location or interaction with unfamiliar horses or people – all of these things can set your horse off into instinctive mode, even if they are normally well behaved in your home paddock.

It’s a heavily (and sometimes heatedly) debated topic on how to overcome these issues and we are going to weigh in on it ourselves.

So let’s have a quick look at some of the commonly recommended solutions.

Desensitisation:

When we use desensitisation skills we are teaching our horse that the best response is no response. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the horse is ok with what is happening to it just that the right response is no response. It also means that the horse has no way of telling us that it’s not coping. If the best coping mechanism is no response and our horse is scared of something and so shows no response we say aha!! See! My horse isn’t scared anymore! What happens is it copes until it doesn’t and then gives us no warning that it’s not coping and explodes. This is how most horses are “broken” in and if they don’t pass this qualification they are considered dangerous horses, unsuitable for riding.

Another term for this process is flooding. We “flood” the horse’s sensory processing mechanism until they no longer respond. This doesn’t mean that the horse has processed the stimulus. It just means they are not responding to it. This therefore isn’t helpful to us when we need to resensitise them to get them to respond to our cues and aids. They are then left with the choice of which stimuli will they react to and the reactions are generally extravagant and “out of character” because they don’t know how to process the stimulus or how to react they only know not to react.

Be the boss/leader:

Being the boss is a critical skill in our working relationship with our young, green, uneducated horses but not always a priority in our mature and educated horses if they have had a good education.

A well educated horse learns to look after its rider. A well educated horse has been exposed to lots of different environments and situations and has come out the other side unscathed and so becomes confident and knows what to expect when put in new and different situations.

The younger, greener horses are still learning and need a competent leader that they trust to show them how to deal with their environment and show them they are safe. An older horse that has lots of homes and instability in its life and learning can become agitated and scared when it goes into new environments because it hasn’t enjoyed the stability and knowledge that it will be going home and ok.

This skill of being the boss can be misinterpreted as being the bigger bully. Every instructor that I’ve ever had has told me that you need to be scarier than what the horse is scared of. This never fixed the spooking but it made me really good at hanging on!

Developing good leadership skills with our horse is one of Equestrian Movements core training principles. It sets our horse up with trust in us to keep them safe and allows us to introduce them to scary situations and show them how to handle it. In the long run it is the key to developing a good relationship and rapport with our horse. Setting boundaries and following through allows us to show up as good leaders so that our horse trusts our leadership skills and follows us into different environments with trust that we won’t let harm come to them.

This takes time to establish and a lifetime to reinforce. You can’t do your leadership exercises in 1 day and then try and cross a busy highway with them. You are challenging just outside their comfort zone and then allowing them to retreat and recover and process that it wasn’t that bad.

Remove the horse from the ‘scary situation’:

As we spoke above if we have put our horses into a situation that they really are unprepared for and overwhelmed there isn’t anything we can physically do to help them handle the situation. We end up damaging the relationship we have been working so hard to build because if we can’t show up as a good leader in this situation then we have lost our horses trust and respect which is hard enough to earn the first time let alone try and earn again once it is broken.

Punishment:

These are common principles that are resorted to when trainers lose their cool and aren’t able to think outside the box or has lost patience. When we resort to punishment we undo all the hard work we have put into our relationship skills. At equestrian movement we teach to not emotionally engage in the situation because this is when you can end up lashing out in frustration. If you and your horse have done all the ground work leading up to this point with the pressure release and relationship building skills you should need to resort to physical punishment.

There is a fine line in using pressure release and it becoming a form of punishment. Both are forms of negative reinforcement but in pressure release there should be the opportunity to choose and a clear pathway of consequence that is resulting in the increase of pressure.

Physical punishment is using force without the horse understanding why and how to get away from the force and using a force that results in injury to the horse i.e. blood drawn, bruising etc. When we use a force that the horse doesn’t understand why, it is not learning how to react correctly, only how to get away.

The kind of force is very important to recognise because the damage is done mentally and emotionally. Some horses are just very “thick skinned” and so require a more intense “pressure” to find their point of responsiveness. People can be scared of using this strength because they don’t want to hurt the horse. What we teach here is to think about how hard its paddock mate would have to kick or bite your horse to get them to go away from their food. They would use just enough to get them to go away but not enough for them to get hurt (hopefully) even though you know they could really hurt them if they wanted. This is part of using pressure/release. Increasing the intensity of the aid to just enough they take notice of you but without hurting them. The level of intensity will differ across breeds and previous training. How much the horse has been shut down by desensitising techniques also plays a role here.

What is Teaching Curiosity about?

The aim of teaching curiosity is about 3 key reasons:

• Safety

• Emotional Balance

• Continued Learning

A horse that is taught to be curious has the capability of reducing its’ automatic instinctive and look for cues from it’s’ rider as to what it should be doing.

A horse that is curious is listening. A horse that is curious is open to learning. A horse that is curious is able to apply his mental and emotional reasoning capabilities and lead even the greenest rider through safely.

A horse that is curious may be interested in the rustling bushes or flying flag, but not tense and prepared to bolt.

A horse that is curious will be interested in you lifting its’ leg (you may get a nose in your back) but won’t be pulling back or kicking.

Teaching your horse to be curious allows new situations to be faced without fear, without flight, without fight, but with open emotional and mental awareness, capability to learn and process, and the development of the bond between horse and rider.

Teaching curiosity reinforces leadership, trust and strengthens our relationship, while allowing the horse to progress with its learning capability.

Do you want to train your horse to be curious, confident and open to discussion?

Click here to learn more

The Key To Training Your Horse

Your relationship with your horse is the key to the success of your training.

It may not warrant a lot of thought, but the strength of our relationship with our horse will determine the speed at which said horse will respond to your training.

Relationships are intrinsically fluid and dynamic by nature. They are influenced daily by how each of us feel, the external stressors, our personalities, our hormones, and heck, sometimes just the weather! There is little different in a human to human relationship to that we experience with any other animal, including horses - except we can generally communicate a little easier with other people.

It is inevitable that one day you will have an amazing training session with your horse, and the next one of the worst experiences in the arena possible. But it is how YOU handle this with your horse that will determine the ultimate outcome - that being the strengthening of a relationship and a better ride next time, or the deterioration of the relationship and an even worse ride to come.

There are several key things you always should remember when working on your bond or training with your horse:

• A horse is a horse - while he can sense you are stressed, he doesn't understand that it is because so-and-so said something to you at work, he just knows your stressed. Breathe and take the time to be with your horse without distractions.

• A horse is a creature with personality and therefore emotions. When working with your horse, it is important not to become emotionally reactive in the training, as this will impede your thought processes and your horse will react accordingly.

• Whenever possible, always finish on a positive note, even if it means you take it right down to the very basics of training. Not only will you feel better that your horse responded correctly, your horse will remember that the work finished not because he was naughty, but because he did something correct.

• NEVER EVER use punishment as a tool for training.

• Keep in mind that every moment you spend with your horse is a moment that could either make or break your relationship.

Training Trainability In Action

I am in a pretty lucky situation - I have the best of all best friends with a multitude of horses, so when mine is out of work (clumsy little clutz he is!), she let’s me play with some of her other horses.

Not many people get that chance - thanks Bestie!

But what it does mean is that I end up working with horses that don’t work to MY expectation.

They aren’t nasty horses - in fact, they are all very affectionate and sweet.

They aren’t naughty horses (mostly) - but they do have a few tricks or habits that, while not creating a real drama, aren’t ideal from my point of view.

In no way do I blame the owner of these horses, or the previous rider, or the horses themselves. This is just what ends up happening over time when people of different skill sets work with horses of different and ever-evolving skill sets. (In actual fact, these horses are exceptionally loved and well-treated, and the owners very intelligent).

But what it does mean for me is that I get to work through these little issues with the horse - and I love doing it!

I get to put into practice the lessons from the Holistic Horse Handling Program and see them come to life. I get to see the horse underneath that wants to look after people and be looked after. I get to see that sometimes, our horses have a lot more to say.

Today I had the joy of working with a very sweet Thoroughbred with a very subtle issue. He was tense when being tacked up - so tense, that he would have a little freak, break away from the tie rail, and take himself back to his feed yard.

To one observer, they might see a naughty horse that learnt that pulling back got him free and away from work. Another might observe that there was too much activity nearby providing over-stimulation.

To those who have trained under Katie, you would recognise that the breathing had become shallow, the body tense, and that he could no longer ‘submit’ to being tied if you brought the saddle near.

The First Do No Harm skillset identified that there was no pain with riding. The Compassionate Leadership skills saw that he became stressed when he was being saddled. So our goal - to show him that he would only be saddled WHEN HE WAS READY TO CONTINUE.

The process allowed him to think, instead of react, to the stimulus; to process what was there and have the opportunity to tell us when he was ready to continue.

• It meant giving him an avenue to communicate he was ready (we worked on that over the last few weeks).

• It meant giving him a way of expressing that he wasn’t ready (and because this is a new option for him, boy did he have fun saying no for a while!).

• It meant taking everything back to basics to understand where the problem lies and what else we needed to do to help him overcome it.

I could have chosen to ride him into submission for an hour, working out his niggles all the way, but that would only mean that the next ride would be the same - or worse.

Instead I chose to spend 45 minutes working with him and 10 minutes in the saddle, but by the end of the session he was relaxed, releasing his tension and taking in lessons and new cues in moments instead of minutes. And it means that next ride, it wont take forever to tack him up, with our ride starting off all tense and agitated. It means next ride, his acceptance of tacking up will be faster and allow him to relax, understand and process his learning.

It’s the difference between a WILLING HORSE and a SUBMISSIVE HORSE - and that is the hugest difference in the world once you experience it.

Would you like your horse to be willing to work with you, instead of just submitting?

Click here to view the Program

Attack Of The Bubble Machine - A Real Life Story Of Drama & Rodeo In The Arena

Competition puts a lot of stress on our horses that we don’t really think about.

Horses are designed to not show they are stressed. In the wild, being an animal of prey, showing signs of stress, injury or illness makes them easy pickings for predators. So quite often it’s not until our horse is really struggling that we tend to see the more obvious signs. 

Competition is stressful to the horse because we are taking them to new environments. Depending on how far you go the float travel takes a lot out of them. We normally enter them in multiple classes so they end up working anywhere from a couple hours to all day. It is a very stimulating environment with all the other horses and chaos that we expect them to be focused and well behaved in. Not to mention the athletic performance we expect on the day and the extra stress we put on our horses because of our own stress about doing well.  

A lot of my riding career I spent competing. We used to compete most weekend and work our way around the show circuit each year. Competing at shows had the extra chaos of all the people, side show alleys, rides, fireworks at night, all sorts of scary experiences. My horse King was always a bit of a sensitive soul. We had gotten a certain level of rapport that he trusted me and worked well for me even if he was nervous. Mostly we would be able to work around the scary things until he stopped looking at them. 

At this stage of my riding career I didn’t do much groundwork or horsemanship. We just worked together because of how much time we spent together and all the things we had worked through. It was my thought at this time that if you had to lunge your horse to ride you didn’t know how to ride. I had gotten pretty good at holding onto a buck.  

One of the classes we were in at the Townsville show, King was working really sweetly and we were working through our paces around the ring, waiting for the judge to pick their horses for line up - when the bubble machine in side show alley started up. Holy was King unimpressed!!! The bubbles started floating across the field. Coming across in front of him. He was only just keeping his cool. I could feel his body all tight and coiled up doing his best to stay focused and keep working. And then one bubble popped on his nose!!! 

And that was it. King was done, no longer could he control himself and he let out an almighty dummy spit broncing around the arena.

I was able to pull him up eventually. He was a mess. But once he settled we carried on with our day and had a successful show. He was pretty stoked to get on the float and go home at the end though!

King not only taught me to ride well, but understanding his nature was the beginning to understanding how our training impacts our horses, and how we can do so much better for them by using the correct tools. That is why I have created training trainability - an online course you can access to strengthen your bond, encourage curiosity, and help your horse reduce the mental stress load, plus so much more.

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Reached The Breaking Point? Here is why...

All horses have a point where they can no longer say “yes”.

Think about a time a work with your boss where they have given you a job and you say yes can do, and then they give you another 3 jobs to achieve in that same time frame and you say yes can do but in the back of your mind you think “oh that’s getting tight”. They walk back in with a few more tasks to add to the list and all of a sudden your at your tipping point, ready to walk out. Or on the flip side, an anxious mess trying to figure out how you are going to get through all your work.  

Here’s another scenario: Have you been given a task that you have finished and handed it in only to be told not good enough? So you’ve taken it back to review and thought “yeah I can tweak that”; handed it back in, and it’s still not good enough. How many times can you be told it’s not good enough, with no recommendations on how to make it good enough, before you stop trying?

These are breaking points. You are pushed to your limits.

How well you cope with this kind of pressure has a lot to do with your passion for the project, your personality and how successfully you have worked through challenges like this before. This is why, with our training, we teach our horses to learn, work through their emotions, and to try and cope with pressure first, before we start giving them tasks like doing well at competitions.

A lot of horses with behavioural problems have those problems because that is the only way they have left to communicate NO.

Ideally I would like the horses not to know that bucking, rearing, bolting, biting and kicking are an option. But often that has already been established by the time I start working with them. So at this point I want to know:

• How much pressure they can cope with before they react “negatively”

• What behaviour they choose when they hit that breaking point.

• What little behaviours and subtle signs they give before reaching that point

• What settles them down

Our Training Tools

When we ONLY use negative reinforcement (IE creating an uncomfortable stimuli to illicit a certain behaviour), we will always hit a breaking point in our horse. This becomes an even more frequent occurrence when as the handler we miss our timing for the release of pressure. Using positive reinforcement we can encourage our horse to seek the correct behaviour through incentivising that behaviour with a reward.

At Equestrian Movement we use gentle negative reinforcement through pressure release to establish boundaries for acceptable behaviour and discipline, and then combine this with positive reinforcement for cue training and aids.

This means that now and then we will push our horse for more, but ALWAYS aim to avoid their breaking point by knowing when and how to release the pressure. We most commonly do this when our horse is challenging our authority. So we MUST know what to look for when our horse is about to hit breaking point.

The breaking point

Basically the horse shows resistance, and that resistance grows in intensity.

If we have done our pressure release right and we know our horse knows to seek the release of pressure.

If we have ruled out all other reasons for resistance (ie, pain, not understanding what we want or not being able to do what we want) we have a spectrum of behaviour.

Initially, if our horse is comfortable they will choose to ignore us, or they could also be shut down (read about symptoms of a shut down horse here). There is a very fine line of responsivity before we are putting too much pressure on the horse and they are overreacting. We want to gently find that point of responsivity to find out how much pressure our horse needs to get a response from our ask, without the pressure overwhelming them and making them scared or aggressive.

Just because you’ve gotten your horse to respond to you doesn’t mean that the horse will pick the right response. But getting stronger and increasing the pressure won’t make them choose the right response either. You have to look at your other tools. Is your horse not responding correctly because:

• It’s in pain (IE teeth are sharp, saddle doesn’t fit, damaged muscles etc)

• It doesn’t understand what you want

• It can’t do what you want

• It is scared of what you are asking, getting the answer wrong and getting in trouble or what you are asking it to do will cause it pain or for it to do something it doesn’t want to do.

• You’ve asked too many times without reward or break

If any of these reasons are the reason for your horse to say no, you will push it to its breaking point and make it over react.

We have covered some simple training rules in our training trainability course to help you avoid reaching that breaking point while still getting the behaviour you want from your horse.

Begin training your horse the CORRECT way

Click here to view the Training Trainability course