Are you setting your horse up to fail?

One of the things we talk a lot about at Equestrian Movement is having adjustable goal posts.

One of our students has actually said that we make it impossible to fail and to finish up without a win.

We call it setting our horses up for success.

As riders and handlers we can expect a lot of our horses. We want each training session to go perfectly to what we had in mind. We want it to not only go as well as our last but also improve on our last. We don’t want our horses to be in a bad mood or temperamental even if they have a good excuse to do so. We don’t want to have to revisit any of our “simple” exercises. If we don’t meet all these prerequisites in each training session we can come away from it feeling disappointed in ourselves and our horses.

These expectations however are completely unrealistic.

We can’t even expect it of ourselves let alone our horse and here’s some reasons why:

• If our horse knows how to learn, process pressure and confidently seek the correct answer without fear of getting into trouble it can still take up to 4 training sessions or more to consolidate the answer (and that is if you thoroughly and confidently know what you’re doing)

• From introducing a new exercise it takes 6 – 8 weeks for balance (nerves to innervate the muscle group required for that movement), 3 – 4 months for muscle growth (building the muscle to be able to execute the movement and initially this is only a stride or 2) and 6 – 12 months for bone and ligament density (for you to be able to get on your horse and they can just do it and hold it for extended periods of time). All this is also as long as your horse doesn’t injure itself, doesn’t have extended periods of time of for one reason or another and doesn’t have old injuries flare up.

• Environment, season, feed, weather, herd conditions will all affect how your horse is working in each training session.

• Shifting emotional baggage. The biggest different between riding horses and riding motorbikes is that they have the capacity to think for themselves and feel. Working with past trauma and emotional reactions to our asks means that some days our horses can be super willing and keen and other days that don’t want a bar of us.

So to deal with all these variables to each training session we have laid out some rules to hold us a little more accountable to what we are doing with our horse and make it easier for them to succeed.

• Try and stick to a maximum of 3 repetitions of an ask and then change exercises, especially if it’s a new exercise.

• Finish on a positive note feeling like you could’ve done more

• Provide your horse with a tool to consent each ask and a way to tell you if they are done.

• Get comfortable knowing where your prerequisites are. If you and your horse are really struggling with an exercise and you can see the training session deteriorating into a fit, know what exercise to move on to that you can shift the dynamics to finish on a win showing your horse you truly are a good leader.

• Know how to bring your horses energy levels down into a state of relaxation and then back up again into work and do it lots. You want your horse to confidently flex their relaxation muscle.

What more support creating a positive working environment with your horse? Have a look at our Training Trainability membership.

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.