Episode 43: Improving Your Horses Steering

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Speaker1:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Speaker2:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this episode, I'm going to explain the foundation for improving steering, which involves becoming very aware of shoulder control. I'll explain the idea that horses don't always follow their heads, and I'll give you an exercise to help you improve your timing with this new awareness. I'd like to thank Eq3 for sponsoring this podcast. Let's get started. The idea that I want to explain is that horses don't always follow their heads. Now, most of us learned early on when we were riding that if we wanted the horse to go to the right, then we'd pull on the right rein, and if we wanted the horse to go to the left, we'd pull on the left rein. And much of the time when a rider pulls on that right rein, it's going to simultaneously pull the head in that direction and then the shoulders will follow. But here's where some people get confused. Do they always follow? Does the horse's shoulder always follow the horse's head? Picture this. Have you ever been trail riding and realized that there was a tree that was going to pass very close to your right leg, and so you decided to pull the left rein to move the horse to the left, and the horse bent the neck to the left, but your leg still hit the tree. Or maybe you tried writing some kind of a pattern over and over again.

Speaker2:
Let's just use barrel racing or pole bending as an example. It doesn't need to involve speed, but it does need to be a pattern that you might ride over and over again that has an object kind of tall enough to hit your leg. Have you ever noticed that when you do that pattern over and over again, the horse starts to know that the turn is coming? So to help you out, they try turning a little bit early. But let's say that your barrel racing and you're going to run to the barrel on the right first as you approach that first barrel, and the horse is thinking, I know the answer, we go around this. So to help you out, he starts to get really close to the barrel. And again, you sense that your right leg is in danger. So you pull on the left rein to try to make that a bigger turn, but that will actually leave his shoulder wide open to still go into the right. And if that happened to you, I hope you were wearing shin guards, because I spent several years with bruises on my shins from this very thing. One more example. Maybe you've been trail riding and you were headed home, and as you got close to home, you realized that you dropped something back on the trail. So you turn your horse to go back up the trail.

Speaker2:
But when you pull on the left rein, you notice that the head comes around to your left leg, but the horse is still headed to the barn. His head is left, but his shoulders are moving in the direction of home. If none of these sound familiar to you, keep on riding. At some point, you'll probably cross paths with a horse that will try this. Or maybe you'll notice a more subtle version of this happening. But here's my main point. Horses don't always follow their heads, but they do always follow their shoulders. And this explains how come sometimes when riders are riding past a gate, they can pull the horse's head away from the gate, but the horse's body continues towards the gate or out of the gate. It is easy for riders to get the impression that horses follow their heads, because it's the first thing that horses are taught to do when we start them under saddle, and it's the first thing that riders are taught happens when they get on a horse. But it's very interesting because as we advance up through the training, we're actually going to introduce some of the opposite idea, meaning we're going to recognize and embrace the idea that the horse doesn't always follow the shoulder, and we're going to be able to move the shoulder in one direction and ahead in the opposite direction. The only way that's possible is because the horse can comprehend it, and the timing and release of when the aids are applied and released matter.

Speaker2:
So what happens is that the same method that was used to train the horse to follow the shoulders, the head and the head. To go to the left and the shoulders. To follow to the left. The same timing that was required to get that to happen. You can accidentally release at the wrong time and have something different happen. So you can untrain that very fundamental thing. And you can either look at it like untraining or adding another layer. Let's go a little deeper here. When I coach riders that have horses at the elementary school level, I very often see horses with steering problems, and this often comes from the horses lack of a higher education. And sometimes it comes from the horse applying grandma's rules. And sometimes it comes from the rider not understanding the release of the aids. And basically they're using what I call self-preservation. So an example of this would be that if we've got a horse that has a lack of a higher education Location, and that rider is riding them around in a circle to the left, and the horse wants to go out the gate. So they're supposed to be going to the left, and the horse starts pulling to the right to get out the gate. And what will happen oftentimes is that the rider will assume that the rider is doing something wrong.

Speaker2:
And so rather than holding the horse accountable to stay going to the left, they will oftentimes release and even turn the horse to the right out of self-preservation. Just trying to find a way out of that. And what effectively happens is that the horse begins to see these new rules. We're going to call them grandma's rules. In this case, the horse starts to say, oh, at one point when somebody pulled on the left rein, it meant go left. But now sometimes when I'm really thinking about leaving the gate and the rider is pulling on the left rein, if I wait long enough, and if I pull hard enough, they will release that left Rein,, and I'll actually get to go to the right the way that I was trying to go. And so most of the time when I see the rider make that type of a choice, they're actually in a situation where they feel slightly threatened, meaning maybe their leg is about to hit the wall, or they're out on a trail and they're about to, you know, go down into an unsafe kind of gully or something like that. And so at the last moment, they give in. And what happens is the horse literally starts to think that's the answer. So it's not that the horse is cheating. It's not that the horse is like, oh, I'll just outlast you.

Speaker2:
The horse is like, oh, this is how the rules work. When you pull on the left rein, you know, 23 seconds later you're going to release it while I'm pulling in the opposite direction. It's very fascinating what we can teach these horses on accident. And when you realize how much can be taught on accident, when you can really follow the line of thinking, when you can start to see how the horses are applying this. That's how all this really amazing stuff happens with Liberty and Bridleless and everything else that you see out there. That's super cool. So again, horses that lack higher education are more prone to this. Horses that have that mischievous curiosity and they apply grandma's rules a little more often. They can be a little more prone to this. And again, if the rider lacks the understanding, and then especially if they're put in a place where they feel slightly threatened and they need, they have some self-preservation pop up there, then you're really likely to see this combination turn into something a little not so pretty. Now, sometimes riders don't notice these subtle steering problems because they don't ride very specific patterns. So, for example, even when I trail ride, I know I'm not nearly as specific as I am in the arena. Now, the argument can be made that I can make myself more specific by saying, I'm going to make you go through the mud puddle on the left, and I'm going to make you go over the log on the right.

Speaker2:
But what I'm going to say is there's a lot less consistency of the cues meaning from the horse's mind. If they don't really already have a very solid elementary understanding, they are switching gears too often. So I don't know about you, but if you switch gears really often, it can be very confusing. So it's one of the reasons why in lower grade levels, the kids don't change classes, they have the consistency of one teacher and they have some consistency there. And then the higher education, the more that the students might have longer breaks in between the classes or higher level classes and and switching teachers. And you know, so there's subtle differences in what the teachers expect. And the higher level human can understand that there's differences between the teachers and differences between the expectations and which one have certain rules. But these elementary level horses, when you go trail riding and it feels like you push them over to the left and you push them over to the right, sometimes what happens is the horse goes over to the left, and then because you're going to go over to the right next to go over that log, the horse starts to think, oh, the combination is we get pushed to the left, then we get pushed to the right. And so then you'll actually get this horse.

Speaker2:
That's like leaning back into your aids because of these subtle inconsistencies there. Like consistently inconsistent. How mind boggling is that? So if we're in the arena, it becomes much more easy to see the the pattern of Aids we're using. So you're going around and you're going, I'm going to move the horse to the left, go straight, move the horse to the left, go straight, move the horse to the left, go straight. But we recognize that if we take a horse and we move it left and then right, and then left, and then right, and then left, and then right. The early on, that will actually cause a horse to get kind of sticky, because the horse will see left is always followed by right. So as you're moving them to the left and they start anticipating, they actually get stickier about moving left because they're already on to moving. Right. And then you start moving right and they're already on to moving left. And those subtle nuances are more obvious when you're riding a pattern in an arena than they are out on the trail. So I love going out on the trail. I love training on the trail, but what I know is the ones that benefit the most from the arena work are some of the horses that need to be able to really see the pattern so that they can get this pattern logic, this logical pattern of thinking in their mind in a place that's a little bit boring.

Speaker2:
So they can just hear those cues instead of going out onto the trail. Now, I want to talk a little bit about this idea of steering horses following their heads, neck reining. I want to talk about this improving steering, because to me, what I see is the horses moving clearly from elementary school to high school to college. And we're going to put neck reining in either upper high school or college. It's really it's in high school, but the very advanced versions of it are in college. But what does all of this shoulder control. And the horses don't always follow their heads. They always follow their shoulders. What does this mean when we start talking about neck reining? And the reason I want this to be emphasized is because if you think about it, if we started riders thinking about the horse's shoulders as the primary thing they were steering, a lot of this would not get nearly as confusing. So again, I said in the beginning that when we early on steer a horse, we'll pull on the left rein, and that often shapes the horse's head to the left, and hopefully moves the horse's shoulders to the left. In a way, if you thought about it like when I pull on the left rein, all I'm focused on is my horse's shoulders going to the left. If that was the primary, and then the secondary was what happened with the horse's head, then this would actually be a game changer, because in a way, later on, I almost want that head and neck to feel a little bit like decorative.

Speaker2:
I'm going to put it in that category for now. It's not really because it's the whole horse's spine and it really all works together. But if we know that we can move the horse's shoulders to the left and it doesn't matter if it's the head left and the shoulders left, or if it's the head right and the shoulders left. What I want you to understand is if you're thinking about riding those shoulders, then this is going to start to get a lot easier to follow the line of thinking I'm about to show you. So when we first ride that horse in elementary school, and we pick up on the left rein, and we pull on the left rein, and the horse's head bends to the left because we're shaping, because we're pulling on it. And then the shoulder steps to the left. So we soften up or release that rein. Then what we're doing is we're teaching that horses. Let's just focus on the shoulder. We're teaching that shoulder to come to the left. Now we got the head with it and we rewarded both. But we're just going to say we're focusing on the shoulders. Now what's interesting is the next step up from that I talked about earlier on in the podcasts about the rider's aids.

Speaker2:
There'll be a day where I do something called Spiral Out and in spiraling out, that means that the horse will be going around bending to the left, traveling to the left and the left rein is going to hold that horse bent to the left, and the right rein is going to pull out towards 3:00. And when it pulls out towards 3:00, that shoulder is going to go out towards the right. And so again, if we kind of almost ignore what the head is doing, we're again moving the shoulders. Now let's use another steering thing and let's go to neck reining. Now, when we go to neck reining, we're going to talk about riding along. And you're holding the reins. And your rein hand is kind of right in the middle of the horse's mane, right in the middle of the neck. And when you want to go to the left, you're going to move that rein hand the hand holding the reins, you're going to move it to the left. And the rein that's going to get pulled on is going to be the right rein, which is the opposite of how we started out training this horse. So in the beginning, left rein meant go left and now in neck reining that right rein is going to mean go left, which sounds confusing, but listen to this. We're still moving the shoulders left.

Speaker2:
It's about the shoulders so the horses can learn these concepts. But first I've got to get you on board. So let's rewind and go down and talk about some exercises you could do. So you could feel some of this. So to make it more simple, there's a lot of stuff that happens when you're riding the horse that you might not be aware of. So if you go into a smallish circle to the left, let's just say that you're going to aim for a circle that's 10 to 15ft wide and about ten most horses. If you've got a really big horse, maybe you can go to 15. But Presto's getting pretty big and I'm still going on the smaller side. And if you ride that horse in a small circle, ten, 12, 15ft to the left and you walk around on that circle, your horse is going to ask a lot of questions. He's going to ask, can I go smaller? He's going to ask, can I go bigger? He's going to ask, can I straighten my head out? If you're asking him to actually bend on that line, he's going to maybe even ask about over bending, bending too much and then taking the shoulder out. And just like in the trailer loading example in episode 38, there might be three things that all happen at once. So you might be walking your horse and I'm going to say, let's have you walk ten of these ten foot circles and you might be walking along.

Speaker2:
And when you get to circle number four, your horse might think, there's got to be a way out of this. And so maybe he's going to over bend to the left, coming around closer to your your left foot than what you even asked for. And then he's going to take his shoulder and really throw it out to the right. So now your ten foot circle just suddenly became 1215. And oh, you notice you're headed to the gate. And maybe you also notice he kind of either sped up or slowed down during that. Now can you hear it? That's why whatever you release on, it's going to matter. The mistake that a lot of riders make when they want to ride around on that ten foot circle is they kind of act like they can just clamp and lock and hold the horse on this. So they'll kind of aim into that ten foot circle. They'll pull that inside rein until that horse is on that ten foot arc, and then they'll just kind of lock up and clamp there. And that's not going to work for very long, because by the time you go for about 4 or 5 circles, your horse is going to start to feel like your aids are dead. Now, this we're actually kind of works when people just kind of clamp on for short amounts of time.

Speaker2:
But what it doesn't do is it doesn't teach the rider how to have feel. So what I want you to do is ride around on that ten foot circle, and I want you to think that you actually need to pay attention to each of those front feet. I want you to pay attention all. But just to make it easy, you're going to have a one, two, one, two, one, two of that inside and outside foot walking. And I want you to think about where those feet are going. Are they going into the circle. Like if they're going to make it a little bit smaller than ten feet. Or are they going right along the ten foot circle, or are they going just a little bit out? And that's going to change at times every step. More realistically, it tends to change every 3 or 4 steps, or you'll notice it on certain points of the circle, like the point that's closest to the gate might have a bow out, and then the opposite side. The side of the circle that's furthest away from the gate might have kind of a bowing in motion, but if you simply ride around and start to pay attention to the subtle shifting of this horse, what you can start to do is you can start to feel where you could have timing to influence the horse. In episodes 18, 19, and 20, I talked a lot about the rider's aids.

Speaker2:
You need to take that knowledge and then the awareness of physical and mental timing to add to that so that your releases get more accurate. For example, if you decide that you want to make the circle bigger and it happens to be on the side of the circle going to the gate, you might have the idea that, oh, I wanted to make this circle bigger. Yay! It worked. But you need to have more than just the physical awareness of of it working. You also need to have the mental awareness of why it worked mentally for the horse. Because you could accidentally start teaching the horse that pulling to the gate was a good thing. So very often I'm doing almost the opposite of what the horse wants to do. So if the horse wants to pull to the gate, that's kind of a mental and physical thing. You can have a very small window where you could maybe use that to your advantage on like the first few rides. But if you're not riding a horse on the very first few rides, then you almost need to start thinking about counteracting some of those places where they're asking questions that are going to lead you in places you don't want to go. So, for example, if you decide to make your circle bigger and you do that by making the physical size of it bigger, closer to the gate on a horse that's already pulling on the surface, it will look like it works, but it won't be a long lasting thing because mentally that horse wasn't making the circle bigger because he was yielding to your aids.

Speaker2:
He was making that circle bigger because he was pulling to the gate. So you're going to be releasing at the time where the horse mentally is not thinking in a direction that's going to be helpful to you in the future. In elementary school, we work to teach the horse to connect the idea that when we pull on the rein, then they should take their shoulder in that direction. Then when we are later on, we're going to actually move that horse up into high school, and we're going to start isolating it in a more difficult way, where we're going to start doing what I call spiral out, and that's going to be asking the horse to bend in one direction, but move the shoulder in the opposite direction. But again, this is about isolating the shoulder. So the horse starts to understand, oh, it's not just about the head going that direction too. It's really about my shoulders. The horse really starts to see that it's not about the head going in that direction, it's actually about the direction of moving the shoulders. And then we're going to be able to eventually get to the point where the horse can neck rein,, which means that we can actually lay the right rein on the horse's neck, and the horse will move the shoulder to the left and even bend to the left looking in the direction of travel.

Speaker2:
It's pretty cool, but it can be really confusing for riders. So the first exercise that I give people to work on when they come to ride with me is I have them reduce all of this down to one rein, and both legs used evenly. The rules of this are when they mount up, they're going to ride in a circle. Let's go to the left. They're going to ride in a circle to the left. They're going to lengthen the outside rein just enough that it won't make any contact when the horse bends. But they're still going to hold it in their right hand, and they're just going to park that right hand on the saddle horn or the front of the saddle, depending on what they're riding in. And they're not going to use that right rein, right hand at all. Both legs have to be used evenly, so you can't use the left one to push the horse out, or the outside one to push the horse in. You're going to use both legs evenly, and the inside rein is the only rein you're going to have, and you can't push it against the horse's neck. So when I first go over these rules, people are like, whoa, this doesn't seem possible.

Speaker2:
How can I use one? Rein, this is definitely maybe going to work to go in, but I have no idea how I'm going to get my horse to go into a bigger circle using these rules. What happens is, if I sit there and hold them accountable for a little while, 5 or 10 minutes, the rider will start to be able to experiment with how they can make this happen. So what happens is, I'll say that I want the horse to bend enough that you can see the left eye, and what happens is the horse is bending enough so you can see the left eye, and the rider thinks the circle's too small. So I'll say, well, if the circle is too small, you have to be able to see the bend of the left. You have to be able to see the left eye so you can release your rein, but you can never release it to the point where you can't see that inside eye anymore. So if you're already to the point where you could just barely see, like the edge of the eye and the eyelashes and stuff, then you need to find a different way. Well, the only other thing you have in your toolbox right now are your legs. So if you've got the horse bent a little bit to the left and you think he's going too far to the left, could you add gas pedal? Could you add both legs and drive that horse forward? And that would make it a bigger circle because straight forward, if we're circling to the left and that horse goes straight, even for a step or two, that steps that circle out bigger.

Speaker2:
So what'll start to happen is the riders start to realize how effective their legs can be for driving that horse forward and to a bigger circle. Now, what's really interesting is I can watch riders do this and I can watch their feel and timing improve. It is so interesting when you constrain and limit the number of aids you're allowed, how effective you can get with those few aids. All of a sudden you can't do left rein and right rein and left leg and left and right leg and all these different things. You've just got one inside rein and both legs to use evenly. You can lighten up on the aids, but you've got to at least maintain the inside bend so that we can see that inside eye. And what starts to happen is the riders start to realize where they step on the gas matters, and where they soften up on the gas pedal matters, and where they pull even more on that inside rein matters and where they put that hand forward. But they don't let it touch. They don't let that rein touch the neck matters, because each one of those things will actually give you your horse a different release, and will reward or will discourage something the horse just did.

Speaker2:
It's fascinating. You've got to try it, ride around, kind of loosen up that outside rein. I don't want you to put that outside rein, down. I don't want you to wrap it around the saddle horn. I don't want you to let go. I don't want your right hand floating around up in the air. I don't think that's safe. I want you there. I want that aid there in case you needed to use it. If something spooked your horse. And not to mention, I just want you to have the habit of having your hand down in that area where a rein, would be carried. I want you to hold that one. But it's it's got a little drape in it. That's when there's that little nice swoop, soft swoop. And if you did pull your horse's head to the left and you bent 45 or almost 90 degrees, that your right rein would not be in contact. So that right rein is just out there. But you could shorten it up if your horse spooked and you'd be able to have it. And otherwise you've just got this inside rein and both legs don't cheat. You'll know if you cheat. I'll know if you cheat, if I'm watching you. But I can't watch you because you're watching, listening to the podcast. So If you cheat.

Speaker2:
Remember, all you cheat is yourself because you don't learn what the exercise has to offer. The awareness that you will develop from just that thought that you were steering the shoulders. You will greatly improve your horse's steering and your feel. I believe you can teach riders to have more feel. I'd like to thank Equine Drive for sponsoring this podcast. I've truly been impressed with their products. When I put my horse popcorn on the joint pellets, I was skeptical. I'd tried other products in the past without noticing much of a difference, and I knew that the science was behind this company, but I was still waiting to be convinced. Maybe it'll help, maybe it won't. But what I really wasn't prepared for was how it helped him in other areas. He happens to have ear plaques in his ears that have been very painful to. Him for over a decade, and he had a noticeable and I mean a drastic improvement in that area. And I know now that that's because of the way the active ingredient, resveratrol actually helps throughout the whole body. And Doctor Marni explains this very well back in episode 36 of this podcast. But needless to say, I have definitely seen results with my horses. If you want to learn more about their products, you can visit thrive.com. And while you're there, let them know that I sent you. Their support helps make this podcast possible. Thanks for joining me. I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker1:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall. Com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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