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.