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.