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 When
a person is looking for a trainer for their horse or themselves they
have entered a vast sea of information that can be confusing. In
growing up in the horse world and having to sort through all of this
information, I learned the hard way about what was good training and
had many examples of what not to do. In my quest for further
education, I always looked for the reasons why training worked or
did not. This inspired me always to find the best educators. In my
findings, I learned to follow these guidelines based on classical
principles to identify good horse training
Whether your trainer is training your horse or training you,
explanations are always important. Maybe the explanation will not
come when they are in the middle of a training session,
concentrating on the task at hand, or maybe not when they are
pushing you to get through a difficult moment in a lesson, but you
should always feel you can discuss with your trainer, at an
appropriate moment, what is going on in the training process. This
discussion allows you to understand and trust the work you are
learning about to some degree. Your skill level may not yet be up to
speed, but the concepts of training should be common sense enough
that you can grasp the essence of them.
The system your trainer uses should have a consistency to it.
Although sometimes it takes some creativity to figure out what works
for an individual horse or student, the method used should have some
thread of common sense and regularity to it. Horses and students
both learn by being introduced to the same foundational methods
again and again until you have something solid to build from.
 Good
training should always build from a good, strong foundation and
develop from there in a chronological way. Training is like building
a house for example; the house first has to have a foundation, then
its framing, so on and so forth. Horses and riders both learn best
if one thing leads to another in a systematic fashion. If you run
into problems, you can always go back to the steps before and see if
the foundation is solid enough.
In all training we hit our rough patches, but if training gets
persistently worse and more troublesome, we can assume there is a
problem. Either there is a physical problem or mental issue. In both
cases your trainer should recognize when training is going backwards
for too long and take an approach of backing off to asses if there
is some sort of pain issue and lower the demands of training, the
horse or rider may not be ready for the degree of work difficulty.
This does not excuse the horses and their riders from having to work
hard to advance, the old adage still applies, no pain no gain,
however working hard is different than being over faced and having
no success.
It is as important to find the right teacher student combination as
it is the right trainer for your horse. Find yourself a teacher that
not only follows these classical guidelines for good training, but a
teacher that has good chemistry in teaching you in the manner in
which you learn. This is an important aspect to learning and having
success. When you find this teacher it is important to stay loyal to
the learning process until you are able to grasp the concepts that
they have to offer you.
Learning new skills and teaching new things to a horse always has
trials and tribulations, but overall training should have a
progression to it. Training should not feel forced, but will feel
challenging and sometimes unnatural when exploring new and
unfamiliar territory. The best judge of correct training is your
horse. A horse not unlike its rider has to learn a certain amount of
discipline, so there is bound to be some resistance, but every
session should have some sense of accomplishment. A positive note
can be as simple as knowing when to quit asking for more. Good
training should have a warm-up, its work period with short breaks in
between, and a cool down. The release of pressure is a form of
reward within itself and always a rider should be encouraged to
praise their horse.
Good training does not belong to a secret society; it is for you to
find, and in using the classical guidelines that have been passed
down by master horseman long before us, may we find it. The
importance of using these guidelines gives us a better insurance to
nurturing a positive healthy relationship with our horses.
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