Starting a pushy and curious 2 year old

I had a first training session in our indoor arena with Roxy the other day. Roxy is a soft and curious 2-year-old.

Because she’s young and I worked with her for the first time, she’s not really aware of where she is within the space of conversation.

She tends to be a little bit pushy and walk over and through me.

In this blog, I’ll show you bits of our first training session. 👇

Leading exercise

So once she starts to get a little busy and pushy I start to give some reference of where she is within the space of conversation.

Within TRT we accomplish this with the leading exercise, where you create some awareness of the spot where your horse should focus on.

This way you’re creating that your horse’s focus will also shift to you, instead of the environment.

You’re relieving him of all the other jobs that are giving him tension, such as watching other horses, and replace it with a singular job: to measure the distance between you and him, like in the video below.

Don't forget about the awareness

When you’ve got the feeling that your horse is understanding what you’re asking of him, take a step back and start with an awareness exercise.

It’s important that you’re not working too long on one specific exercise. Especially with a young horse, who has to learn a lot of new things.

Check your horse to see if he is gaining value of what you’re asking of him.

Moving front legs

Then you can start with moving the front legs.

You can ask your horse to follow the rein and step behind and across.

This will teach him to find balance and control.

Moving hind legs

The idea is that you create flexion and bend in your horse’s body and therefore more stability and physical relaxation.

This is the pattern you can always go back to when you feel your horse getting tense in his body.

Working with tools

You now have an understanding of the basic groundwork pattern and from there, you can teach your horse how to control himself in a human environment.

Within TRT we do this with the tools.

The tools represent different elements like touch (see the video below), movement, and sound.

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