16/01/2024
Making Your Intentions Clear
Last week in the post What Are Your Intentions, I discussed how subtle movements of your body language, seat, and focus are the actual cues and that your hands, legs, and feet are for reinforcement, support, or corrections when riding your horse. To be clear, these are not the beginning, but the end goal. Begin with obvious, proceed to subtle.
So where do we begin? With the manual basics for western riding. Teach the horse how to respond correctly to the bridle, a neck rein, and to move their front feet through your reins and hands, then how to respond with their shoulders, rib cage, hips and hind legs with you legs and feet. Create maneuvers of every adjustment you would consider your horse should know by putting those responses on in the beginning. Build the backup system first.
Start from the bottom up, not the top down. Where you point your nose or belly button means nothing to a horse until you can manually and on purpose change speed and direction with obvious cues.
If you look at developing your horse to a high level, what you learn to understand is that in the end there is no such thing as a correction. What you do instead is ask the horse to make a different move or position that he already knows, instead of the one they're currently making. Maneuvers are simply moves made on purpose.
Take all the steps leading up to showing them what your intentions are, then they will learn to read you willing without resistance.
So what are the steps? Back it up. Remember, your intention comes last in the beginning, first in the end. Show them what it means when you take hold of them. Show them what to do when you lay a leg, lay a rein on the neck, or move forward, back left or right. Go through the process of causing your corrections to first be moves made on purpose.
If your horse doesn't know how to respond instantly to a movement or position you are asking for, you have no business thinking you can use it as a correction because it won't work.
Certainly not within the time limit that a horse can relate to. How long is that? Within 2 seconds. That's all the longer a correction should take when you're taught them how to respond correctly.
How long does that take to teach a horse how to respond correctly within the time limit? It depends on how stupid or smart your horse is, your determination to stay with that one thing until it's in there, and your ability to be able to break things down to the smallest pieces. It could take minutes, days or weeks, but once that time is taken and your horse can be manually handled with instant responses to the obvious cues, now you can proceed to subtle. Now you can help them understand what your intentions are. # # #