18/11/2025
Do you need 'riding lessons', or 'training lessons'? If your horse has ridden behaviour issues, the answer is yes, and yes. 😄
Often, the horse's ridden behaviour issues, and tension are caused by the rider. So, part of my focus is to help the rider to change what they do and how they do it.
It's not a telling-off process, but a fun discovery of how the rider is creating the unwanted behaviours, and how to change that.
How does it happen?
Cues are often unbearable - erratic, too firm, unceasing, abrupt, clumsy, and completely incomprehensible to the horse, because they haven't been retrained. Other cues are too light to be perceived by the horse, which is also unhelpful, and can produce very confused horses ('nutcases').
The result is cues that don't work, and result in unwanted behaviours ( eg, reefing, bucking, won't go, won't stop, naps, rears, etc), so nastier equipment is used. Poor horse. Severe bit, mouth-clamping noseband, spurs, etc - all happily justified by the 'horse-loving' equine industry. Bit of cognitive dissonance going on there! 🤪
An example is, kicking a horse for go/faster. This is pretty horrible for the horse, like shouting at a child. Sensitive horses will become tense, calmer horses switch off to the go cue. I teach the rider how to deliver subtle cues that the horse understands, and doesn't find objectionable.
Another example is having poor, clumsy and erratic contact. This is very common, and is the source of many oral, head and neck behaviours. Relentless restrictive bit/rein pressures *that do not affect the speed of the legs*, are really unpleasant for horses.
To try to get relief from this, a sensitive horse will trial reefing, head tossing, and all the mouth issues (open mouth, tongue lolling, going behind the bit, etc). It usually works quite well, however briefly, and that is how horses learn these unwanted behaviours - ie, like almost all unwanted behaviours, in all horses, they are human-induced. A less sensitive horse will learn to lean on the bit, which is horrible for everyone!
Unbearable contact is usually brought about through the misunderstanding that we can yank a horse into an outline with the reins, rigid arms, and a death-grip. This is also horrible for everyone!
ES coaches are fine with having a horse go in an outline, but we train it progressively, through the operant responses of stop, slow, turns, yield, and long walk, which then *result* in an outline - with just a light contact, and no rigidity in the arms (shoulders, elbows, wrists and fingers all relaxed - it's called 'toned relaxation').
So, although ES isn't directly about having a riding lesson, we do have to help the rider to ride better so the horse isn't exposed to unbearable, relentless and unintelligible pressures from the legs and reins.
In this sense, riding technique is inseperable from cue delivery. To do this correctly, we also need to know a little about learning theory - how the horse learns. This is why I help to correct students' riding, and I also include simple theory into training sessions. So students understand:
🌟 What to do,
🌟 How to do it,
🌟 Why we do it, and
🌟 What to eliminate
The last couple of cases have been very rewarding, because this is exactly what we have been working on - Operator Error! 😂
So, do your horse a huge favour by learning this stuff and using it correctly. Tense horses will relax, and 'idle' horses will learn to go.
Everybody happier! See before and after pics. Horses tense to relaxed. Once the horse is relaxed, we can make further progress regarding behaviour issues, and refining the way of going. Train it in walk first, then trot and finally, in canter.
PM me to enquire.
