The New Horse Training Science

I’ve been pretty effective in getting results with my horses over the years. I felt I had done a good job with them, using what I knew and always asking myself how I could do better. Recently, some new information has come into my arena and I’m quite mesmerized, happy, overwhelmed, and excited!
In my lessons with students, I’ve noticed the ones who have used positive reinforcement training in the past or present often got much faster results that I had. Ouch. But I’m an open person so I went to figure this out.
What I found was that there’s not only one way that a horse learns, as I had been taught in the past, but there’s many ways a horse learns and we need to always be finding the Easiest way for our horse to learn. The reason for this is just simple fairness. It’s more fair to train in a way that works with the horse.
I have used pressure and release for so long I was able to get great results, or so I thought. Then I started adding positive reinforcement and got greater even faster results! Who knew? My horses are happier, willing and want to do more with me than ever before.
OK, there’s more! Then I came across this training around the Central Nervous System Down Regulation in Horses an Humans. Blows my mind off the charts! I started implementing things I have learned and my horses are learning and progressing even faster! What I have done inadvertently over the years is blow through a horse’s ‘threshold,’ that is how much pressure they are able to take, I just forced them through that because I had the pressure and release techniques to do so. When I started changing the way I do things, when I improved myself, my horses got better. I now look to see if my horse has reached a ‘threshold’ and then I wait, that’s all, just give the horse time, space and attunement if needed and voila! my horse is back with me, calm, stable, able to handle the situation. I’m very very excited about this and just tipping my toe in the water so to speak. There’s tons of science and information online to research and learn about this. I encourage you to do so. Google Sarah Schlote, Dr Richard Peters, and even Warwick Schiller does some interviews with these individuals who are teaching this so find him and listen to his podcasts. That’s what I’m doing and I’m loving it!