Horse Training

A lot of the terms that horse people use have been misused and overused to the point that they are no longer meaningful. Because the term means different things to different people, it is more apt to be "mythunderstood" than it is to be helpful, especially in a training situation. Saying that a horse is "on the bit" is one of those terms. As a horse gets near the top of the training tree, we like to talk about him being "on the aids" rather than being on the bit.

Collection is at the top of our training tree and it is another one of those mythunderstood words out in the horse industry. A lot of people look at a horse and say he’s collected when he’s really just all bunched up in front.

Followed in the correct sequence, the steps in the training tree methodically prepare a horse both physically and mentally to play whatever game the rider likes to play. The training tree has ten levels that have to be mastered in sequence: rhythm, relaxation, freedom of gaits, contact, straightness, balance, impulsion, suppleness, putting the horse on the aids, and collection. Now, not every horse is going to have the physical ability or the mind to go the upper levels. And more than 90 percent of the time, a horse gets limited by his rider’s ability level. But following the training tree sequence can help any horse be the best he can be.

Horses are creatures of habit. And the habits they learn can be good ones or bad ones depending on who’s handling them. And whatever habits or patterns they have when they come to you can be changed if you go about it in a methodical, horse-logical way. If memory serves, one of the horses that taught me this was a Morgan stallion that belonged to a friend of mine. This was back in the ’60s and I don’t remember the horse’s registered name but we called him Little Brother.

Most people think you control a horse by controlling its head. You put on a lead rope or a bridle and you use that to show the horse how you want him to start and stop and turn and move his feet and disengage this or that and other stuff. So how do you control a horse when you don’t have a lead rope or a bridle on him? Every day, there are a lot of people chasing horses around in pastures asking that question.

Every animal handler or hope-to-be trainer needs to establish a relationship that allows the animal to understand them and figure out what they are asking them to do. The best and most effective system must be based on trust. The obedience or compliance we are looking for flows from that trust. The basis for a horse trusting you is that everything you do is routine and usual. There’s never anything sudden or startling going on. And the way you start that feeling in the horse is by doing everything you do around him in a rhythmic way.

Rhythm is at the bottom of the training tree because that’s how you get it all started. If the horse is not worried, not wary of sudden things or unsure of what is going to happen next, then you are starting to create a relationship built on trust. From the minute you come in contact visually in the pasture or by his hearing your footfalls or your voice as you come down the barn aisle, you want to be doing everything rhythmically. Steady footfalls, steady movements open a gate or door, everything steady and even to convey a feeling to the horse that everything is going to be consistent and predictable.

As the horse progresses in his training, you begin layering new things on top of what the horse always knows. If you have a problem, you go back to where the horse last accepted everything and start over from there.

When we first start working with a green horse, we get his trust by working with him in a relaxed and rhythmic way whether we’re catching him, grooming him, or doing some groundwork with him in some kind of pen. You want the horse to be comfortable with your presence and with the general pattern of what you’re going to do today, based on what you did with him the day before and the day before that and the day before that.

As our baby horse progresses up the training tree, we’ve given him a solid base of trust. We work with rhythm and relaxation doing anything we do from catching him to grooming him or putting on his leg wraps or giving him some play time before we put his tack on. He’s comfortable with us and the general pattern of the work we do together. When we first got on his back, we allowed him to move with complete freedom, never interfering with or restricting his natural gaits. The next step is to get him working with freedom of gait while seeking and accepting contact with the rider’s hands.

We get halfway up the training tree before we introduce the concept of straightness to the horse. We spend the first months of a horse’s training working on rhythm, relaxation, and freedom of gaits. In this early phase of training, we want him to feel comfortable carrying the weight of a rider. In the second phase of his training, we start to develop the quality of his forward movement. We ask him to accept the contact between the bit and our hand. Toward the end of his first year of training, we put our focus on straightness.

Balance is one of those terms in the horse industry that is so misused that it’s become mythunderstood. All it really means is that the horse is distributing his weight equally on all four feet. We want him carrying as much of his weight on the ride side of his body as on the left side. We want him to carry as much weight on his two front feet as he does on his two back feet.

If you’ve ever taken riding lessons, you can relate to your horse when it comes to being corrected for something you didn’t do quite right. Maybe the instructor just got a little sarcastic. Or maybe she raised things to the level of a good scold. Maybe you messed up big time and got yelled at big time. Or maybe to prove her point about what you did wrong, the instructor got really stern and made you do whatever it was over and over and over to drill into your head.

Close up, horse shows look like serious business. They’re certainly business because their economics affect an awful lot of different people in a lot of different ways. For breeders and trainers and show managers and hamburger slingers and farriers and lots of other people, horse shows are a big investment both literally and figuratively.

As the horse moves along through his training, you go from showing him what you want to asking him for it and finally he knows what you want well enough that you can just tell him.

When a horse is just being kept as a pasture ornament, nobody pays much attention to his activity level. He pretty much does what he wants and being a horse that is mostly going to be ambling along grazing. As soon as we start training a horse or wanting to use him for some purpose other than admiring glances, however, we have to start managing both his mental and physical activity levels.

Horse training is a mental game played in a physical medium. Here at Meredith Manor, we use a system we call heeding to teach students the rules of the mental games they play with their horses. They learn how to use corridors of methodically applied, horse-logical pressures to show, ask, and eventually tell their horses what shapes they want them to take.

Over the years, I’ve had to unlearn a lot of what I learned when I started working with horses in the 1950s. I’ve changed my training methods so completely that I consider myself a born-again horseman. I owe my conversion to the horses that were generous and forgiving enough to tolerate the rough and ready handling methods in vogue when I started training while I figured things out.

When some students first arrive here at Meredith Manor they don’t see the point of the ground work we call "heeding." Moving their horses around on the ground doesn’t seem very exciting. They’re impatient to get in the saddle and start riding. They might jabber something about "respect" or herd hierarchy or some other mumbo jumbo if I pushed them to come up with a reason why the ground work was important. But they really don’t see much connection between how they, say, lead their horse from the barn to the arena and how they ask that horse to canter.

I was young and pretty cocky when I started working with horses. Back then, I figured that the first thing I had to teach a horse was that I was the top dog. Then it was the horse’s job to pay attention to me and do what he was told. Like a typical person, I was always thinking about the end result I wanted and jumping right to telling the horse what to do. If he didn’t do what I wanted, I’d go to enforcing my supposed authority and make him do it. The horse had to acknowledge me as the leader and understand that if he didn’t do what I wanted, there were going to be consequences.