Event Preparation

I’m three weeks away from an event planned 8 months ago. Preparation was well underway until mid-February, when my area was hit with an ice storm so significant that a state of emergency was declared. Besides going two weeks with no power or internet, the horses were of course out of work. Additionally, the ground went from saturated with water, to literally frozen overnight. As this is not my first rodeo, I knew that the likelihood of hoof and postural issues related to the icy ground was significant. 

While I took a very proactive approach to managing the potential issues, I still had two of my three riding horses end up with abscesses. Cue several weeks off each, with treatment and recovery.

My third riding horse is coming back from two years of broodmare status, and has some neural tension and postural challenges from carrying and birthing two big, spectacular foals.

So, here I am, several weeks away from this event, feeling rather unprepared. 

As I brought each horse in to work yesterday, I reflected on my options. Do I train hard, try to fit in as much “work” as possible to be “ready”?

The fact of the matter is, no matter how hard I train, these horses will not be more “trained” in the next 3 weeks. In fact, pushing hard right at the end would likely cause more problems than it would solve. The potential for physical and mental discomfort, and the subsequent backslide in quality of work, is highly likely.

As my big, hypersensitive, emotional hanoverian mare had her first ride back yesterday and was really in her feelings, I made the choice to follow the “the slow way is the fast way” philosophy and spend 25 minutes on walk-halt-park transitions, and on establishing a relaxed, stretchy walk. We walked for the entire ride. While perfectly capable of doing advanced work, there’s simply no point without relaxation.

My less-talented but more emotionally secure mare showed up with good quality work but needs fitness. If I try to push past her fitness level, I will lose the quality I spent years establishing. Instead I did short intervals of harder work, with lots of stretching walk breaks in between. We need fitness, and fitness takes time. I can’t rush that process without sacrificing my principles.

The young, talented, mentally-sound mare needs bodywork. I spent her session working on her body, and free schooling. Developing fitness and helping her release her body will gain me far more than riding time at this point in her development. She’s trained, and not going to get more trained in the next three weeks while her body is in her way.

This is the same approach I take when preparing for horse shows, and especially in the warm-up AT the horse shows. It’s not the time for training, it’s the time to ensure the basics stay correct, the fitness is there, and the details are as clean as can be.

To be honest, for an overachiever like me this is not easy to do. Experience tells me that this is the right choice, hard as it may be. I know that my horses will arrive at the event with relaxation, healthy bodies, and as much fitness as can be had given the circumstances. Accepting the things that are out of my control and sticking to my training principles in preparation will always be the right choice.

Most Basic Tool

Oftentimes in clinics or lesson situations I hear a common question:  How do I know what to work on?  It’s a great question, and of course there are a whole lot of ways to answer it.

One of the things I like to suggest to my students is to ask themselves a simple question:  “What is the most basic thing that is not functioning right now.”  Here’s an example of what that might look like.

In a lesson last week, a student and I were preparing to begin work on shoulder-in.  Her basic walk-trot-canter was going very well, excellent topline connection and transitions were improving.  We had focused the previous week on thinking about loading the hindlegs in down transitions within the gaits (big trot, little trot) rather than just shortening the stride.  Shoulder in is a naturally related exercise at this level of development.

Off we went, expecting this to be fairly easy.  8 meter circle to prepare (this student happens to ride a pony), and viola!  Shoulder in!  Except not. There was a turn, an attempted half-halt, a protest from the pony (loss of topline connection) and a desperate attempt from the rider to salvage the hot mess and continue in something shoulder-in-like.  Wruh-wro.  

I suggested she abandon the shoulder in and try starting it again, in walk now rather than trot, focusing on just turning onto her track and bringing the shoulders in.  Preparation good, turn good, then again with the pony protest and subsequent rider desperation.  Pretty common circumstances, really.

Take 3.  Back up another step in the process...circle, onto the line of travel, half halt.  Pony protest.  Aaaahhhh...now we’re seeing something important.

Back up one more step:  Walk-halt transitions in sequence, 4 steps of walk between halts.  Pony protest.

That’s the winner.

That’s the most fundamental piece not functioning.  If we can’t do walk-halts with a good topline connection, there’s exactly zero chance of us getting a good shoulder in.  Why?  Because the reflex responses to build the exercise aren’t functioning.  If the building blocks aren’t there, you can’t piece them together to build the bigger picture.  That’s all there is to it.

So the homework for the student was to go back to walk-halts, and when those were functioning well, add a layer...bring the shoulders one step in.  When that’s successful, add steps down the track.  My best guess is that this will be resolved by the time I see her again next week.  Clever rider and pony, they’ll clean this up quickly.

So, the next time you’re struggling with an exercise, think about it in small parts.  Which piece is not as tuned up as it could be?  What simple thing can you work on to make everything else easier?  Do you and your horse understand the various tools being used to build out a more complicated exercise?

One last thing.  This lesson was a great reminder for me as a rider.  I thought about it the next day and found I was able to tune up my own riding and get real benefits.  That’s one of the delightful parts of being an instructor…the opportunity to learn from students!

The Gap Between Language and Understanding

I spend quite a bit of time observing other equine educators, be it by watching video tutorials, reading articles, watching clinics, tests from horse shows or “winning rounds.”  Basically I’m obsessed and a huge geek.  I’m also jaded and have no time or patience for things that lack congruence.  

Many years ago I went to audit a lesson where my eventing instructor at the time was riding with his mentor.  This clinician was (and still is) a HUGE name.  He writes flowery language about harmony and balance. I mean, it’s the stuff we love to hear about how the process should go.  I expected to enjoy the lesson, but part way in he instructed the rider to “Grind your seat bones into your horse’s back and he will round his back up into you.”  Say WHAT now?!  That one sentence was it for me.  If you don’t understand fundamental biomechanics of the animal you’re training (or the concept of reflex responses in muscles suffering an assault) then I don’t want anything to do with you.

How can it be that a person with this sort of ability to use the language of good training in written work completely misses the basic concepts when it comes to execution?  Honestly it’s a pet peeve of mine, mostly because it is tremendously confusing to folks who are trying to learn.  If the words and the execution don’t match, the student can’t actually learn what good work is.

I see so much of this in dressage, where words like biomechanics, self-carriage, lightness and balance get tossed around while the rider’s bulging biceps and red face tell the truth about what’s actually happening.  Or, the conversation may include concepts like throughness, engagement, and impulsion, when the horse is behind the bit and dropped in its ribcage with hind legs trailing.  How are students of horse sports supposed to understand what is correct when a huge percentage of the teaching population doesn’t know what it is either?

It’s time to do a better job teaching teachers, so we can elevate the quality of work in our industry, and better support the horses who show up every day doing their best to meet our expectations. Remember, they don’t really care if they “progress” or not, so it’s up to us to learn everything we can about them and work to make this process healthy for them.

What Does Your Longeing Look Like?

The first time my mentor asked me if I knew how to longe, I was indignant. Of COURSE I know how to longe. I was prepared to show him my skills, and to say that he was unimpressed with my demo would be the understatement of the century. “Oh, so you know how to run a horse around at the end of a rope.” Ooof.

To be fair, nobody had taught me anything else. My understanding of the art of longing was nil. I had no idea that there was anything beyond taking an edge off or giving the horses some work when it wasn’t possible to ride.

It wasn’t until Peter that I learned how much you could actually do on the longe, and now it’s an integral part of my program.

In my opinion, there should be a throughline in everything we do, beginning with leading, through stationary and moving groundwork to longing and riding. Therefore, the groundwork should support the longing which should support the riding. It’s a lovely opportunity to observe the horse and educate their mind and body.  Longing allows you to do all of this without the burden of the horse carrying the rider.

I have seen very few examples of productive longing outside of what Peter taught me. Why is this? I believe it’s an undervalued skill or exercise in our industry. It takes time to learn, time to do effectively, and requires a whole separate skill set than most riders have been motivated to learn. 

Additionally, it requires an agenda motivated by mastery and development, rather than performance. This could quickly turn into a rant about the industry as a whole, so I will attempt to contain myself. Process orientation vs product orientation is a significant distinction in our industry, and those motivated mostly by the end product will have a hard time seeing the value in taking the time it takes to learn this step.

For me as an educator, correct longing is also an essential skill for teaching. All of our beginner students start on the longe, and without correct longing this approach would likely result in significant detrimental effects on the horses. Going round and round in an unbalanced way creates undesirable habitual movement patterns and compensatory postures that would lead inevitably to repetitive use injuries.

Lastly, this is a skill best taught individually. It takes time, and finesse, and often equestrian business models don’t support individualized instruction.

One of the things Peter said to me way back when, was that correct longing would not look like one circle in the footing, but would leave tracks all over the arena. What does your longing look like?

What is Horse Welfare-Based Training?

When I was a young rider, starry-eyed and full of dreams, with little to no actual, practical experience to back up my passion, I had no information with which to determine if a suggested training methodology or approach was valuable or beneficial to my process. In fact, I didn't know there was a process. I knew that I saw people having various levels of “success” in the barn around me, and the horses and riders responded differently to different teachers and methodologies. I watched elite riders on TV (those 2am VCR recordings of show jumping and dressage competitions, and my absolute favorite, The Rolex Kentucky 3 Day Event were watched over and over, and yes I still have stacks of VCR Tapes).

At any rate, I had no data, research, or information to base my perspective on. As a bold and ambitious but fundamentally clueless kid, I used the loudest voice in the room to guide me…my horse. The truth is, at the end of the day, the opinion of the horse is the only real opinion that matters, but not all horses are quite as clear as my first horse was in voicing that opinion. As hard as it was to deal with sometimes, I’m grateful to this day to have had a horse with a huge opinion so early on in my career, as he sent me on a very different path of information-seeking than my contemporary young riders followed.

What my horse approved of were trainers who I would now say were horse welfare-based. I can use that terminology now, but what does it really mean? I certainly wouldn’t have known then.

To me, horse welfare-based training means that the training program is designed with the best-interest of the horse in mind. This program must consist of a variety of elements that are reciprocal and all work to serve the same end goal: The Welfare of the Horses in the Program. 

Our program covers several topics that current equine welfare research indicates are essential to the well-being of horses, and that we find contribute directly to the success of our actual training program. That is to say that putting effort and attention onto learning about and adequately managing these areas improves our training ease and outcomes. These topics include:

• Equine Lifestyle Management

• Equine Nutrition

• Equine Hoof Care

• Equine Dentistry

• Equine Bodywork 

• Functional Groundwork

• Equine Fitness Development

• Rider Emotional Management

• Rider Mental Wellbeing

• Rider Fitness Development

• Progressive, Functional Training 

You may notice that Training is the last item on the list. It’s quite a large category, and is essential of course and thoroughly integrated into the entire process. It is, however, pretty impossible to mount a successful training program without the other steps in process at the same time.

I use the word successful again here, and immediately I think to myself, but what does “successful” actually mean? Honestly it’s different for different people from the micro perspective, but in a macro way, success to me means that the horse remains well during the process we choose. One student in our program may want to showjump 3’ and success to them means achieving that goal, while success to another may mean horse camping without any incidents. Both are amazing goals and the path to achieving those goals has more in common than not, but doing either one successfully in my opinion means arriving at the goal with a happy, healthy horse, who is comfortable and confident, and capable of doing the job requested with minimal stress and no mental/emotional/physical damage. If we can’t meet that metric, the simple act of jumping around 3’ is a pretty hollow win as far as I’m concerned.

A guiding philosophy that has served me well throughout my career comes from Baron Hans Von Blixen Finecke, a Swedish riding Master who taught my Mentor, Peter DeCosemo, who remains my greatest teacher.  The Baron says in his 1996 book “The Art of Training: Lessons From a Lifetime With Horses”: 

Horses are complicated live mechanisms systems of muscles and bones controlled by the nervous system and with a will of their own. They were never created to carry riders on their backs–nor did they invite us to try it. The idea was always ours; we never asked for their permission, we just went ahead and did it. So we must take responsibility for how we go about it.

It can be argued whether or not we have the moral right to impose ourselves in this way and to this extent on a fellow species. In this day and age, when people are quite rightly more concerned about their plight, I am sure many would vote against it. The argument in our favor would be that most of us do, after all, look after our horses well. We feed them, house them and, generally speaking, see to their immediate needs. So, in a sense, I suppose one can say that we are justified in what we are doing. Maybe it is fair, then, that they give something in return. Without us, they would be lost. Without them, we would be poorer.

Therefore, what we must have in mind in our training (which is teaching them movements which are quite unnatural to them), is to make the procedure as fair, painless, and helpful as possible. To make them work for us we have to make them understand us in such a way that they enjoy what they are doing because we motivate them and reward them when they try to oblige. We must teach, not bully!

…

To teach, we must have a curriculum. If we want to have an influence on our horse, in order to develop him physically and mentally toward higher performance, we have to work with – and stick to – a system, which leads to the goal with a reasonable degree of success. It must, as far as possible, be based on facts. We must learn about our “raw material” – horse and rider – with regard to the mechanism of movement as well as the psychological reactions during the normal process of training.

With that philosophy as a baseline starting point, we can dig into learning about our “raw material” in a holistic way. Access to information and research has exploded since the Baron wrote his books, but even then being evidence-based was an essential piece of the training puzzle.

As we move forward into deepening our understanding of our horses and ourselves, we can be sure that the facts will evolve. That is the way of science. If we are doing this well, we learn and test and grow. The essential piece is to remain open to learning, and to hold tight to a philosophy while allowing the details to evolve.

They say one lifetime is not long enough to learn to ride a horse, and nearly 35 years into the process I have to concur. For me this means that the joyful endeavor of being in relationship with the horses and the people who love them will always be fresh and real, and will keep my mind and body stimulated for years to come.

As we venture down this path of learning about horse welfare-based training together, please understand that the path is in fact the “thing”, not the destination. Do not rush, there is no “there”.

Observation (Dr. Dyson Lecture)

Some time ago I attended a wonderful Webinar hosted by World Horse Welfare, with Dr. Sue Dyson as the keynote educator.  Dr. Dyson has a rich history with horses, a diverse career as a competitor and veterinarian, and many, many research studies under her belt.

Recently Dr. Dyson has developed an ethogram (a catalog or table of all the different kinds of behavior or activity observed in an animal) for observation of pain in the ridden horse.  Historically, pain in the ridden horse is not something we’ve been able to quantify, but with extensive research, Dr. Dyson has developed a list of characteristics, which when seen in certain quantities, are indicative of a horse in pain.  It’s groundbreaking research, and it’s my genuine hope her work will change the way ridden horse behavior is perceived.  

At the end of the Q and A, in answer to a question I do not remember, Dr. Dyson made a call for owners to “observe your horse!” This hit a chord with me, because it's a fundamental element of  my training program.

It’s rather difficult to know what to do with your horse, if you don’t know where you’re starting.  There are several things I do on a daily basis to evaluate where I am with each individual horse, here are a few:

I take an ABSURD amount of pictures and video of my horses.  I mean ABSURD.  I take pictures of them standing in the field, of their feet before and after trims, video free schooling, and now that I have my PIVO, I video most of my rides.  Seriously, it’s insane.  HOWEVER, I can also now show empirically the changes in my horses over time.  Want to know what their habitual resting posture was in the field 18 months ago?  Got it.  What did their trim look like this time last year?  Gimme a sec, I’ll pull that up for you.  Wondering how their most recent trim affected their movement?  Standby, here’s video of the day before and the day after.  

So, what am I assessing?  To start with, absolutely nothing, I’m simply observing.  I want to know what IS, not make a judgment about it.  I started using the phrase Non-Judgemental Observation quite a few years ago, and I think the Non-Judgmental part is key.  If I attach a value judgment to it, it suggests what I see is either positive or negative.  I don’t really care about that, because it’s just one moment in time.  I prefer just to notice what I see, so that I can make a plan.  Sure, I have an ideal in my head, but horses and the training process are multifactorial so I can’t make clear-cut assertions about one moment in time.  All I can do is allow my observations to suggest one of the many optional paths, and see if the path I choose changes what I see.

I mentioned above some things that I track:  Habitual resting posture, hoof morphology, loose movement, and under saddle work.  Other things I pay attention to are harder to document unless you’re much better than I at keeping a training journal, but are equally important and a part of my daily observation practice:  What’s my horse's mood when I go out to get them from the field?  Are they walking in keen and alert, or draggy?  What is the sound of their footfalls?  Are they even, or is one step consistently louder than the others?  What areas on my horse’s body are sensitive to grooming?  What area do they encourage me to groom?  Noticing these things will allow me to observe for my current “normal,” guide my bodywork and training decisions, and notice when things change.  This is key to tracking behavioral changes in your horse, which can be used as indicators of pain, as per Dr. Dyson’s ethogram.

No single one of these observations will tell me everything, and rather often I don’t know what the observations “mean” straight away, but they do help me to begin to build a story about the horse which in turn allows me to better understand them, the challenges they face, and what I might be able to expect about their individual training process and needs.  In addition, it gives me the info I need to track early warning signs of possible maladies.  

To be fair, it takes quite a lot of time to begin to “see” horses.  It’s easiest to see things that are external (a horse standing with one hind leg always out behind them, for example, or preferring one canter lead over the other) but quite a bit harder to train your eye to see things that are more internal (like posture, core engagement, intrinsic vs extrinsic balance), but those are things we need to develop an eye for  in order to approach our horses with a level of sophistication that can truly result in optimization.  Like any other skill, it takes time, but is well worth the effort.

One last word on Non-Judgemental Observation:  One variable that is constant with your process with your horse is YOU.  A massive part of being a successful leader and trainer is the ability to observe yourself so you know what you’re bringing to the table each day.  More about this in the future!

One More Thing! I’ve put together a mini-course on Non-Judgmental Observation.  This will be available to folks who subscribe to the newsletter I’m developing. This weekly newsletter will include 5 topics, ideas, or training concepts that have been present throughout the week. Subscribes will receive first-access to news, events, courses, and any other opportunities we offer. We hope you join us on this new adventure!