16/11/2025
So well written, read it, understand it! ... horses are not just born knowing how to coexists with humans, we need to find a language we can both easily navigate, and then start the journey of communication and learning!
Pressure Training, Meaning Making, and Why Your Horse Is Not a Mind Reader 😎
Today’s public service announcement is about a phrase that has been tragically misunderstood: "release of pressure."
Mention it online and most people using it have no idea they are, a noble few actually do it well, and a very small but extremely noisy minority will announce that you are a horse-traumatising, ego-marinated capitalist with an IQ low enough to trip over a mounting block 😬.
Which is awkward, because release of pressure is simply one of the world’s oldest meaning making system. Horses, dogs, us, all living creatures! It predates language and is everywhere in our lives.
Horses do not arrive with a built in glossary that reads...
- Rope tight behind my ears means step forward
- Leg means trot
- Human wafting hand in the round yard means please move off in that direction
They have to be shown what things mean. Their reality is built through physical experience. That is training.
You present a cue. You set them up so the behaviour is easy to try. The moment they try the right thing, you remove the pressure. The release highlights the meaning. They connect what they did with the moment you went quiet 🤫.
There are two parts.
1️⃣Set up the behaviour so the horse can actually do it through instinct, balance, association, or a lucky guess.
2️⃣Teach them to recognise the cue so eventually you do not need any escalation at all.
This is the part the internet misses. Escalation exists as a way to inspire a try. Not as violence. Not as dominance. Just an increase in a stimulus delivered in a controlled, thoughtful way. Can it be labelled "aversive" pressure - yes, but that is a spectrum with sensation at one end and hurt at the other and you can control the scale.
Pick up the lead rope softly. Add a little feel. Step to the side so their balance invites a step forward. The moment they try, you go silent. Repeat until they follow the soft pick up alone.
Or liberty work. Raise your hand. Add a cluck. Then, inside the three second learning window, swing a stick with a string that makes generates movement and a whooshy noises a distance away from the horse. They will be triggered to move away. You drop your hand, quiet your voice, still the stick. Repeat until the horse recognises the hand signal alone means to move off.
Here is the bit people forget. There are many ways to escalate pressure and the good ones are subtle. They tap into instinct, sensory awareness and balance. They help horses work things out quickly.
If you think pressure training is all pain and domination, you either saw bad training or did not recognise what good training looked like.
Can people do it with force and pain? Yes. It is the slowest, crappest, most counterproductive road to Rome. It also builds tension into everything the horse learns. Pain produces braced bodies and scrambled brains. Yet at best you get performance minus trust and you can see it.
When escalation is done well, it sparks a thought. A shift. A step. A try. And the learning lives in that instant of quiet.
If you need to escalate every time you touch the horse, congratulations. You have done crap training. Your timing is off and the horse is enduring you. Reward based trainers get accused of bribery. Pressure based trainers get judged by the worst examples. Bad training is ugly in any flavour.
Now for the fun part. Once a horse learns a few cues with clarity and timing, something brilliant happens. They learn how to learn. They start spotting patterns. They realise that new scenarios are not traps but puzzles they already know how to solve. They search. They offer behaviours. They watch your body. They look for the release. Training becomes a dialogue between you and the horse.
Good pressure training teaches the meaning of touch, balance, movement, body language, sounds and simple words like whoa. Once meaning is established, escalation fades. If you are still escalating often, your technique has glitches.
Yes, some horses carry baggage. Yes, pressure training gets a terrible reputation because most people only see the disasters or we get the tough cases where horses have been left struggling or learnt dangerous behaviours. It is sorting through the baggage that presents more chaos.
But when done well it is elegant, fast, thoughtful and in harmony with how horses use their sensory systems, learn fast and solve problems. It builds clarity, confidence and a shared language they learn to focus on and follow.
So here is your line to remember.
Pressure release is simply teaching a horse to recognise a cue, try a behaviour and find meaning in the moment you let go. It is not violence or cruelty. It is communication. A touch language. A balance language. A clear, simple system of signals.
If anyone gets huffy about the terminology, let them know the scientific name is negative reinforcement. Negative meaning subtract. As in take the pressure away. I leave that to the end because nothing switches humans off faster than terminology that sounds like tax paperwork. Horses handle it fine.
And yes, this one is longer than usual. Explaining pressure release in a short blog is like trying to summarise quantum physics with fridge magnets. Good pressure training needs timing, coordination, judgement and an understanding of horses.
The bottom line is very simple.
It is not violence or force. Anyone insisting otherwise has just announced how little they understand about how learning works. And if you want to debate escape, avoidance, moral superiority, ethics or anything in between, go ahead. I know those arguments better than the people who use them 😎.
This is Collectable Advice Entry 80/365 of challenge and this series on words and terms in the horse world. For you to hit SAVE, SHARE but not copy and pasting.
