The Training Tree: Rhythm

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.

The Training Tree: Relaxation

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.

Rhythm is at the bottom of the training tree because doing everything in a consistent, predictable way gets the horse’s attention and builds trust in the horse. When you’re doing things rhythmically and you are never quick or abrupt or “startling” to the horse, then the horse will relax. Now you can start to work with his mind.

The Training Tree: Freedom of Gaits

When it’s time to ride the horse, you introduce him to the saddle and the blanket and the bridle in the same relaxed and rhythmic way, breaking everything down into the smallest possible bites you can think of. The same goes with introducing the rider’s weight. Now you’ve got the horse accepting the bridle and the blanket and the saddle and the rider mounting and the two of you are just standing there in the arena waiting for the next thing to happen. Maybe you’re scratching him and patting him to keep his attention. At some point, the feeling’s going to change for him and the horse is going to offer to move a step. Your job is to allow the horse to move however he wants and to just follow whatever he does. You allow his freedom of gait.

The Training Tree: Contact

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.

The Training Tree: Straightness

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.

The Training Tree: Balance

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.

That seems pretty simple. But there’s a catch. A horse has this long neck with a big heavy head hanging out there at the end of it which naturally has a tendency to shift a little more of his weight onto his front feet. When he’s just hanging around being himself, a horse typically carries about 60 percent of his weight on his front feet.

The Training Tree: Impulsion

The horse has rear engine drive. Impulsion describes the powerful thrust from the hindquarters that propels the horse forward. Impulsion is the surge that occurs when the horse’s hindquarters push off the ground. With impulsion, there’s an elasticity and spring to the horse’s forward movement. A rider needs an independent seat and an understanding of how to coordinate aids in order to ask the horse for impulsion.

The Training Tree: Suppleness

Suppleness is another mythunderstood word in the horse industry. Suppleness simply means the ability to bend without stiffness. We want the horse to have loose, pliable jointshis hocks, his hips, his knees, his shoulders, his poll and his jaw. There are other joints that must be flexible, too, but generally when we talk about a horse’s ability to bend, we’re talking about one or another of those major joints.

The Training Tree: On the Aids

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.

The Training Tree: Collection

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. Maybe he’s got a lot of activity drive and the rider is hanging on his mouth so he can’t move forward and spend it as freely as he’d like. So he curls up his neck and prances around and people who don’t know any better say he’s collected. Or maybe the rider doesn’t really know what it means to have an independent seat and put her horse on the aids. She just fusses with the reins and the horse, being an obliging sort, bends at the poll, tucks his nose, slows down so she thinks her horse is “on the bit” and that she’s got collection.