SETTING A YOUNG HORSE UP FOR PERFORMANCE SUCCESS
AN EXAMPLE OF SETTING A YOUNG HORSE UP FOR PERFORMANCE SUCCESS
Horses just respond how they feel….if they feel uncomfortable or LEARN to associate something with being a bad experience then they will get anxious, tense, suffer separation anxiety, be distracted, difficult to get on with or many other things that horses do when they express their negative emotions. If you can get this reality etched in your brain and make sure that you always view the horse through this lens and take responsibility for ensuring that a horse is set up for a GOOD experience then you are going to set your horse up for success.
Now let me give you an example. Here is a short video I was able to sneak of Katrin Kuenstler and her young 3 year old warmblood Tommy that featured in my last blog. Tommy has had less than 30 rides now but ever since his first weeks under saddle he has been carefully introduced to new environments. He went from the round pen, to the arena, to walks around the property with another horse, to bush riding, to visits to close by small venues, or bigger venues with no activity going on. On Saturday he went off to his first big venue and an indoor arena with a low key activity going on. That activity was a clinic that Katrin and I run every few months! I start early and give private lessons focusing on coaching horse training skills and working horses through training plans and Katrin starts a little later and does a small group pole class with a focus on rider position and gymnastic training. So before the start of Katrin’s pole class she strategically introduced Tommy to the environment.
Although Katrin hoped to ride him in the indoor that was not the objective, the objective was for Tommy to get cool with the environment on the ground just being lead around, being asked to work and do some ground work and then doing ground work with a saddle on, being ok being mounted in the environment and finally being ridden. It was Tommy who was going to determine how far he got in the time Katrin had. If he could only handle being lead around, then that would be it!
Katrin started by just leading him around and letting him investigate and check everything out, gave him lots of scratches and just took her time. He even got to eat carrots at the spectators stand, which is an area that can make many horses worried during competitions….so now Tommy thinks it’s a carrot dispensary…so he thinks it’s pretty cool! He got to check out signs, windows, sprinklers, fire hydrants and many things until he thought it was all cool. Then he did his ground work, had a bit more of a look around, popped his saddle on, did a bit more ground work and then hung out a bit more at the carrot dispensary before getting on and going for a walk around. Katrin had no expectations of how far she would get but she ended up being able to work on canter circles and bending which is what she has been working on at home and Tommy worked really well. He then went and hung out in a yard next to some horses that where old hands at hanging out in yards at clinics and shows and munch on hay. Although the experience was new for him and he was well prepared for the step up to such an environment from what he had done before and he was never pushed to a point of being overwhelmed…..he had a good experience! When the day comes and Tommy is ready to compete Katrin does not want the added stress of the environment to be impacting on his stress levels because that means he will have more focus and energy to put into a good performance!
So many people take young horses out and make the experience pretty bad, they go to a lesson and start working on new harder things or go off to a show or riding club lesson before doing a heap of preparation….so the horse gets worked hard and because they are stressed by the environment the whole thing becomes even more of a drama for them to experience. Then the performance starts falling apart either when they are out as the horse suffers tension under saddle, or the horse stops wanting to go on the float because they associate the float with bad things happening to them. Then it can start falling apart at home.
It took LESS than an hour to get Tommy cool with leading around the venue to dismounting after riding….being strategic and thorough in a horses training might seem like the slow way but setting horses up for success actually doesn’t take that long at all!
