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Does your horse constantly have a high level of tension when you’re riding?
Does he keep spooking at a certain object (although you did move the chair by an inch!!), keeps spooking in a certain area or when he hears something?
Is everything fine at one point and the next he explodes and he has become extremely tense?
Do you feel it’s not getting better even though you’ve invested time in letting him get used to it and letting him know “the thing” that scares him won’t kill him?
Let me start of with some good news:
Every horse can be confident and relaxed
So also your horse can become relaxed.
But you know, we focus so much on the story and the symptoms, that we start to believe this is just the way my horse is and that it can’t be changed.
I remember when I moved to the Netherlands several years ago. In no time almost all of the stables were filled with Jazz offspring.
In the clip below I talk about the symptoms these horses all had in common and why this can be changed.
So, in short…
All horses are born only knowing how to survive in nature.
They rely on their natural instinct of flight, just like the horses by Jazz.
And that’s okay… for a horse that lives in nature.
It’s not okay when you want to work with your horse and you bring them into our human environment.
Because the blueprint they have of the world doesn’t prepare them for competitions and every situation we will bring our horse into.
These situations will seem life-threatening and our horse will respond based on his blueprint with either a fight or flight reaction.
And both are not ideal.
“But my horse is fine, up until that specific moment”
There are also horses that seem relaxed most of the times, but will explode all of a sudden or when something in partiular happens.
How can you even prepare for that or even solve that?
Well, whether a horse is constantly in a tense state or only suddenly, in both cases we have the following problem:
Your horse doesn’t know how to manage his level of tension
With some horses the signs of them being tense are very obvious (tight in the body, head up, calling out to other horses, short, irregular steps etc), but a horse might also try to ignore the thing that’s causing tension.
And then he can seem fine up until he can no longer ignore the pressure and then you get the ‘big explosion’.
If you want to learn more about why a horse ‘explodes all of a sudden,’ read the blog post below.
Since we bring a horse into our human world, it’s our obligation to teach him everything he needs to know about our human world.
You basically want to give your horse a new blueprint, a blueprint that will tell him how he can manage his own level of tension and feel more relaxed and comfortable.
And of course, we all try to do this, but we don’t really learn how to do so.
And as a result…
There are several mistakes we tend to make
First of all, we hope it will get better by trying to let our horse get used to it. By just repeating it over and over again.
I mean… at one point he should start to feel relaxed about that corner in the arena alongside the hedge, right?
But, unfortunately… no.
And since you’re reading this, I’m expecting you’ve realised that it’s not getting better either.
It’s not getting better by just letting your horse experience something over and over again without giving him new information.
In fact, it can only make things worse because it can lead to a pattern of bad behavior.
You can’t expect different results by doing the same thing over and over
Other mistakes we tend to make, is force a horse to go past something and adding even more pressure to the situation.
And of course, this is completely understandable and in the past, I’ve also made this mistake.
Especially when you’re, for example, at a competition and you feel your horse might spook at the judge’s box. Of course you’ll be tempted to just give a bit more leg aid to push him past it.
Or something else we tend to do is trying to distract a horse from the things that’s causing pressure or trying to prevent him from seeing it.
That really is a temporary fix and won’t solve the underlying problem.
You can learn more about what we should and shouldn’t do when your horse is afraid of something by going to the blog below:
Okay, so now you know what not to do. How do you solve the problem then?
How can you teach your horse to stay more relaxed and have less tension?
Start on the ground to solve the problem
This might sound strange.
I mean, you have the problem mostly during riding, so why should you work your horse on the ground?
I explain in the video below why I always (yes, always!) start on the ground when I have a horse with a lot of tension and spooks a lot.
Alright, so you start with groundwork.
What’s next? What’s the next step?
There are three steps to reduce tension
I basically always first start with the leading exercise, followed by the groundwork pattern. With the groundwork pattern you teach your horse how to feel relaxed in his body.
You then move onto the second step, which is working with the tools.
The tools are not(!) there to let your horse get used to certain elements.
The tools are there to teach your horse how to respond to the certain elements of tough, sound, movement and approach.
And that response should be the relaxed posture of the first step. So you basically teach your horse to create a relaxed posture when something ‘scary’ happens.
Because a relaxed body will create a relaxed mind, stopping the vicious downward spiral of getting more tension.
And then finally, the third step is where you apply the first and second step to the riding. This is where you build the bridge from working on the ground to working with your horse in the saddle.
It’s the final, crucial step to overcome spookiness and tension.
Earlier this year, we held an Online Masterclass about the 3 steps to reduce tension.
In the clip of the Masterclass below you see the three steps I take to teach a horse how to manage himself.