11/12/2025
Some horses are born bold. They're less spooky than average and more eager to try new things. If you own one, count yourself lucky.
For the rest of us, nurturing a sense of confidence and boldness in a horse is an intentional act, especially if we’re asking them for anything that involves navigating unfamiliar obstacles and environments.
Whether you trail ride, you do cross country, or you're in the ranch disciplines, you’re going to find yourself in situations where you need your horse to push forward into, over, or through something they haven't had time to fully acclimate to.
Think about a cross-country course or a ranch trail class; it’s just not possible to stop and quietly do approach-and-retreat for ten minutes at every single obstacle. It doesn’t matter if your horse has crossed other bridges, tarps, jumps or water before; each one is new.
We’ve talked before about how horses struggle to transfer context between experiences. So how do we get them to trust us more implicitly, even if we haven't practiced the exact scenario beforehand?
There's two phases to it.
In phase one, the early stages of training, it’s still critical to build confidence slowly with plenty of low intensity approach-and-retreat, encouraging the try, and showing them how to navigate things that make them uncomfortable.
👀 We unpacked that process fully in the "Orientation, Attention, Engagement" podcast episode.
But just like any area of refinement, there’s a training phase, and then there’s a "do it now" phase.
💡 To step up to that higher level, we need to build a more advanced habit.
The core idea we need to teach our horse is that, when they encounter something unfamiliar, they should expect the rider to take a more active leading role —"get up on the wheel" to use a race car analogy — ride forward, eyes up, and project a sense of confidence and purpose that horse can align with.
When the horse feels this, we want him to think "continue forward". We want him to trust and know that regardless of what's in front of him, he's going to be okay. We're leading him, and he can rely on us to keep him safe.
With timid, "looky," or reactive horses, this is tricky. It takes a lot of intentional repetition to get them used to the concept of moving forward without needing a ten-minute safety check.
Now here's the biggest mistake riders make when trying to push a timid horse through something. . .
🌞 It's as predictable as the sunrise:
1️⃣ The horse approaches the unfamiliar object (let's say it's a tarp in this case)
2️⃣ The horse tries to evade the tarp and leans sideways, or slows down and hesitates to go forward
3️⃣ The rider, trying to help, picks up on the reins to steer the horse back toward the tarp
4️⃣ The very act of applying rein pressure puts the horse in more of a mental and physical bind
5️⃣ The horse's resistance and stickiness escalates; he slows down even more or balks completely.
6️⃣ Now not only does the horse refuse to go over the tarp, he's also preoccupied with arguing and opposing the rider
7️⃣ Tension escalates; the horse starts tossing his head, sucking backward, or trying to turn tail.
8️⃣ The rider adds even more pressure, pulling and kicking (what I call the "touchdown" mentality. . . trying to force the horse over the goal line)
9️⃣ This extra pressure does nothing but legitimize the horse's refusal; he fights back harder, to the point of kicking out or threatening to rear
🔟 The rider gets intimidated and stops applying pressure, allows the horse to move away from the tarp to avoid escalating further
😰 Horse breathes a sigh of relief and processes what just happened
🤔 Horse realizes that refusal/rearing when there's something unfamiliar in front of them grants a huge release of tension
👉 Horse threatens to rear sooner next time, because they've learned that's what gets them relief
😡 “If I feel tension and I rear up or kick out, I create my own relaxation"
😩 The rider literally becomes a non-factor at this point, horse has taken matters fully into its own hands
🔁 Horse becomes like an alcoholic reaching for that "bottle" every time they feel worry or stress
📉 Horse's confidence is severely damaged.
😳 Rider is scared and p**sed off.
💩 Nobody's happy.
I've watched this cycle play out more times than I can count. It's all so tiresome.
What's the antidote?
Teach your horse that "just because I’m touching your mouth, it’s not an excuse to argue, slow down, or sq**rt left and right."
Show them that their job, when they feel that bridle contact, is to go to it and WITH it;
Follow a feel;
Soften to the bridle, yes. . . but also drive INTO it;
ORGANIZE your balance to enable yourself to do that.
How?
🤓Let me show you a clever way to build this exact response. . .
In fact you'll follow the same principle as we do when teaching a horse to spin, and many other things:
🌟 BUILD THE RELEASE INTO THE MANEUVER ITSELF
For obstacle training, this starts with an exercise we call "Bend-And-Draw" from our Foundations Of Excellence program.
Bend-And-Draw like a half-halt on steroids. It's a transition drill, but souped up and made way more effective.
😇 Honestly it's the unsung hero of our entire training system. It's not as sexy as Forward-And-Around, and it's not as easy to master as Turnaround-On-The-Foot. But it's the older, wiser sister to Bending-With-Vertical. The one who went to finishing school and doesn't tolerate bad manners.
In this drill, you go from trotting or loping a straight line on a loose rein, to doing a downward transition, keeping the horse straight for 4-5 strides, then finishing with a bending circle.
🛠️ But here's the trick: during the downward transition you pick up, collect the horse, ask for deep vertical flexion, and really get them compressed and driven up into their face. Even as they're slowing down, you are maintaining impulsion and asking them to stay engaged and drive forward into contact.
On a horse that's never been exposed to Bend And Draw, it does wonders for rooting out bad habits like stiffness, leaning, or what I call "dropping a cylinder"—where the horse just clatters onto their front end and their hindquarters quit. It's all about teaching the horse to maintain composure rather than sloppily collapsing into the lower gait.
👉 We want to challenge them to maintain a sense of balance and engagement. This exercise will show you if your horse can't.
When you first try this, the horse will resist. They’ll try to duck or lean left and right. They might root their nose, flip their head upside down and try to go full "dragon neck" mode, stop too soon, or just bash forward and blow through your hands like a Bulgarian freight train.
These are all just different manifestations of the same resistance. That desire to argue (translation; the horse's lack of ability to accept and integrate your aids coming on while maintaining forward motion) was already in there. . . you just put the horse in enough of a bind to finally expose it.
🤔 Now, what do you do with that resistance once you've exposed it?
A lot of trainers will get in a tug-of-war, trying to muscle the horse's face into position, get them to break over vertically, and keep their body straight. The problem is, the straighter a horse is, the easier it is for them to lean and pull against you. The second they flip their head, your leverage evaporates, and they’ve created their own release. This is how you inadvertently teach a horse to be bad in the face (translation: fractious, won't accept contact in a relaxed way).
🤓 The smarter way is to redirect that resistance. You’ve provoked it on the straight line; now, don't fight it there. Instead, you off-ramp all that wayward energy onto the circle.
This is the "Bending" part of the Bend-And-Draw.
You channel all that tension—the leaning, the stiffness, the head-tossing, the arguing—onto that circle without either releasing or escalating the pressure.
🔑 This is the absolute key.
You don't let the horse hollow out and get off the hook just because you're circling, but you don't turn it into a fight either.
Why is this better? Because on the circle, you have leverage. You can add just enough lateral bend, which combined with the vertical flexion, makes it harder for the horse to just brace against you with a rock-hard neck and shoulder.
You can stay on that circle for three, six, nine revolutions; however long it takes. You just patiently hold that pressure and maintain forward motion; neither increasing nor decreasing, and wait. You wait for the horse to finally soften, relax, settle, center up, and give (SABR layers click into place). That is when you release.
You’ve created the tension, and then you’ve shown them a more effective, and correct, way to resolve that tension and find relief.
Why does this work? Because horses are smart. They're pattern-recognition machines. They start to notice the workflow:
➡️ downward transition
➡️ pressure comes on
➡️ stay straight for a bit
➡️ circle
➡️ fully relax and collect
➡️ pressure releases
With enough repetition, the horse starts to anticipate the physical and mental END STATE of that process (collected, engaged, on the bit, centered, relaxed, listening) before you've even begun your circle.
So when you do this exercise right, something magic happens:
🪄 Your horse starts offering that softness sooner.
He starts to relax, seek your hands, collect, and stay balanced ON THE STRAIGHT LINE during the transition itself.
This, of course, is exactly what we want.
We've literally "circled our way to straightness." The circle was just a tool, a means to an end. Now we can phase it out because the horse understands the "Draw" part of "Bend-And-Draw".
😎 Cool, huh?
It's not an exciting exercise, but it gets results. It's one of my favorite "secret weapons" for building confidence in more sensitive horses, or bringing back horses whose minds were blown up by previous bad training.
Now, what does any of this have to do with the tarp obstacle?
Everything.
We just built the button we needed to fully master it. We taught our horse, in a "dry work" setting, that when we pick up on their face and start actively guiding them, they don't have to argue. They don't have to get sticky. They don't have to stop their feet. Their job is to get soft, listen to our guidance, drive up to our hands, and maintain forward motion.
This is the very foundation of "throughness."
So now you’ve mentally primed the horse to accept active guidance, under pressure and amid tension, without balking. This is the antidote to that whole disastrous cycle we talked about earlier.
Now we introduce the obstacle.
🏈 And we'll use a concept I call the "Option Play".
This is the real meat of it. We take our Bend-And-Draw exercise, and we add the tarp.
At first, I'll just treat the tarp as a cone that I'm circling. I'll lope straight across the arena toward it, downshift to a trot, collect the horse on the straight line, and then begin circling the tarp, just like I did in the dry work. I'm still working on that softness, getting the horse to relax into the contact while moving.
The second that horse breaks at the withers and settles into my hands... that’s the release. But here’s the trick: the release is not to stop. The release is to open my inside leg and steer the horse in toward the tarp. Now I'm presenting an option.
In a football analogy, I'm a quarterback and the horse is my running back. The ball has just been snapped, and one of two things is about to happen.
🏈 I offer the turn, and the first option is that the horse maintains that forward momentum and willingly steps onto the tarp. This is the "handoff." I let the horse "take the ball" and go over the tarp. As soon he crosses it, I give him a huge release. I might stop, pet them, verbally praise him like he's worth a million dollars, and let him soak. He took the option of boldness, and I want to reward that.
🏈 The second option is that I offer the turn, same as before, but the horse snorts and I feel him trying to balk and suck back away from the tarp. He's refusing my handoff. So, I pull the ball back. I immediately drive him forward and keep his feet moving—very important to NOT let the horse stop—and resume trotting around the tarp in the other direction. Now we’re back to the "Bend" part of our Bend-And-Draw, and my vertical flexion returns; asking for softness and engagement again.
The horse now has a new, very clear choice. He's learned the most important, hard-and-fast rule: you are not allowed to stop moving your feet. You must maintain forward motion under all circumstances. You can avoid the tarp for now if you're not ready, but you cannot balk.
🧠 When you show your horse that pattern enough times, they start to do the math. They realize, "Huh. . . it’s actually way easier and the human leaves me alone more if I just take the handoff and go over the tarp. If I hesitate, we’re just back to doing this circling."
You bait the horse into understanding that boldness and forwardness are where the release is.
Once they've got that, we evolve to the final piece.
We run the same option play, but this time on the straight line instead of the circle. This is the "do it now" phase.
🏈 Lope across the pen, collect, downshift, "get up on the wheel," ride forward and aim straight over the tarp. You're running the play. If the horse maintains that forward impulsion and drives up to your hands, ready to cross, let them take the handoff and go straight over. That’s the end goal.
🏈 But if, as you trot up there, they start leaning hard or act like they’re going to seize up and balk, pull the ball out and drop back to pass. Before the horse gets stuck, drive them forward around the outside of that tarp and resume your bending circle. They refused the easy option, so now we're back to the less easy option.
🧠 Through anticipation, the horse quickly realizes it's just simpler and easier to go straight over in one shot.
Practicing this exercise with a few different obstacles is how you prevent, or fix, that awful balking, "sucking back" or "sulling up" habit.
And you can see how, if you compare what I just laid out to the disaster example I mentioned earlier.
The horse in that disaster scenario learned (accidentally) that stopping its feet and refusing to go forward was an option. This whole sequence I've just shown you is designed to (on purpose) take that option off the table.
When a horse's feet stop, their brain stops. Under saddle, communication and confidence are built through movement. You have to keep energy in the system.
🎯 When you master the Foundations Of Excellence program, you don't deal with "refusal" because you've reframed the entire problem. That option never even crosses the horse's mind.
Instead, they expect that whenever they meet something unfamiliar, you're going to help them through it. And they defer to you.
🪄You use the Bend-And-Draw to build a button that says "rein contact means follow a feel and go with it", "engage", "go to it", "two-way dialogue" and "converse with the rider".
🏈 And you use the Option Play to prove to your horse that boldness is, quite literally, the path of least resistance.
You’ve rewired their brain to expect that when pressure comes on, the answer is to listen, get soft, and keep going forward.
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