Episode 343: Why “Almost Right” Will Bring Less Tension

Episode 343.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 343.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
What if the idea of you aiming for perfect balance is actually causing your horse to have more issues?

Speaker2:
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.

Speaker3:
Ready to be on the podcast Luna.

Speaker1:
In today’s episode, I want to talk about rocking the teeter totter. We could also call this balancing your go versus your whoa. Or if you’re riding your hand and leg balance. When I think about these topics, they’re all related in my mind because when I’m thinking about training a horse, there are lots of things that I recognize appear as opposites. The ability to go. The ability to stop. So Luna is joining me for the podcast today because I want to talk about a concept that I have talked about in some different ways before, but I want to take it to the next level. Today on the podcast. And that is the idea of rocking the teeter totter. The way that I want to look at it today is through the lens of balancing your aids. And there’s that word balance. When I was thinking about recording this podcast, the word balance is what comes up frequently in conversations. And when I think about a rider trying to balance the aids, the first image that comes into my mind is somebody taking a coin and trying to balance it on its edge. So imagine depending on where you live, but take any kind of coin, I’m going to picture a quarter in my mind, and I’m going to try to balance that quarter standing up on its narrow little edge. It makes me want to hold my breath, because it makes me want to be very careful that I can very gently try to balance that and set it down.

Speaker1:
And it’s going to be really hard. And think about the tension that’s going to come into my body when I try to balance that one delicate thing on that narrow edge. And that’s the problem that I often have with the word balance being used, because that tends to bring a level of breath holding and perfection into many riders bodies. Now the concept in general of balance, I totally agree with. I’m just saying watch your body when you’re working on something like balance, because I find it much more useful to think about rocking a teeter totter. If you don’t love the teeter totter idea when you’re thinking about the balance idea, I have a giant exercise ball. It’s actually one that I made with Weaver Leather, and it’s for the horses to use, but I also use it to balance on. And when I sit on this really large ball, my feet come off the ground. And the one thing that I noticed when I was trying to teach myself to balance on that ball was that holding your breath and not moving is the fastest way to fall off the ball. Don’t believe me? Give it a try. Or better yet, I bought a unicycle one time. I don’t recommend that. But if you do sit on a unicycle, hold on to something and notice that the first thing that you’re going to need to do to become more successful is to put more movement in your body.

Speaker1:
Now, mind you, it will be micro movements, but there’ll be more movement in your body. It will not be the idea of holding your breath and trying to make it perfect, because that’s not going to work. Balancing on the unicycle or balancing on the ball. What if that same thing is true for your horse? What if the idea of you aiming for perfect balance is actually causing your horse to have more issues? So the reason that Luna is joining me for today is because I clearly see the illustration, the similarities between groundwork and riding. And as I was doing a particular exercise on the ground with Luna the other day, I realized it would make a really good example of one of the problems that people frequently have when they’re riding their horses, and that goes back to balancing the hand and leg when you are doing particular exercises. If you’ve been listening to the podcast in order, you’ll know I’ve been talking about forward as a direction and inside of a number of those podcasts. I talked about your reins and your legs and how you would use them. So this kind of complements it, because I want you to think about this when you are riding your horse or in this case, Luna is walking along beside me. I am looking to get a more and more refined level of that rock in the teeter totter.

Speaker1:
Or that if you want to call it the balance in the Aids. Again, careful with that word. So let’s go to the groundwork example here for just a minute. So what I’m doing with Luna right now is I am walking, and my goal is to teach her to stay with her eyeball beside my shoulder. So that means I don’t want her going ahead of me, and I don’t want her lagging far behind me. But for fun, let’s pretend she’s going to make a mistake one way or the other. So she’s going to be too far back or too far forward. So then for me, I need to decide which of those wobbles or mistakes I would rather have her make. Would I rather have her be a little too far back or a little too far forward? You with me? Now, as I am thinking about which of these two I want today, that’s actually going to influence the way that I apply the Aids and the way that I release the Aids. So for me, there’s a level of the rocking of the teeter totter that’s going to happen that is temperament based. And that is because especially if the horse is default to being more extreme weather, that’s extremely hot or extremely cold. Those horses are basically telling you about their overall thinking. So you’re going to get an overall theme with a very hot or very cold horse that’s going to be similar, but with all the horses that I train, I actually end up seeing this as a training technique more so than a temperament technique.

Speaker1:
So the temperament is telling me it’s probably going to be flavored towards spicy or flavored towards cold. So I’m probably going to be tending to do more of the exercises that balance that particular temperament out. But think of it like this. If I have a very spicy horse and I do a lot of exercises to make that horse become quieter, colder, slower thinking, then that means I’m going to turn around and have to do exercises that actually bring that horse’s spice level back up. This is why I like to talk about it being more of a rocking of the teeter totter. Because when I have trained the horse to become like a colder horse, then I can actually teach that horse to come back up. Not by default, but by choice. Okay, let me put this into an example. So right now Luna has joined me and we are walking around my indoor arena and I am asking her to follow along. And she happens to be on my left shoulder, which is not the Traditional shoulder that people lead the horse at. So because she was raised and this was not the normal shoulder that people would lead her, the side they would be on, she has more questions. And so I’m asking her to walk along beside me and I have a carriage whip or lunge whip that I am using to communicate with her.

Speaker1:
So I’ve got my body which is walking, and then I’ve got my whip, which is reaching out behind that could touch her to ask her to go forward. So for the purpose of this podcast, I want you to think about my body being more like the reins that would slow her down and my whip being more like the my legs. If I were riding, that would speed her up. And the reason my body is able to act like the reins. I could say the rope, but I’m not going to pull on the rope. It’s actually draped over my shoulder right now so I can hold the phone and record this. So the reason that I’m going to say my body is going to be like the rains that slow her down, is because she has been trained to not go past my shoulder. So when I lead her in and out every day as I lead her around, I would rather have her make the mistake of being a little bit too far back than to be a little bit too far forward, so I actually don’t want her eye to go past my shoulder. So she already knows that piece. But what she’s not as sure about is exactly where to be. And that’s okay for me. I don’t mind leading them around and having them 2 or 3ft behind me or a foot behind me.

Speaker1:
I don’t care if they’re dropped further back. Just for clarification, I don’t mean literally behind me. I mean relative to my shoulder. She’s still off to my left hand side. She’s not directly behind me, but I mean behind as in falling further behind me, distance wise. So for me, in this example, I want to have a cue that says, Hey Luna, when I come into this situation and I behave in a certain way, I want you to be very dialed in and focused. I want your eye to be right beside my shoulder the whole time. So that’s what I’m trying to communicate with her. But instead of doing that, there’s going to be the potential for mistakes. And this is where the rocking of the teeter totter comes in. So let’s just for fun, say that Luna is too far behind. And let’s say that I hand her over to somebody at a clinic and I say, okay, Luna is too far behind you. I want you to send her forward. And Luna is 12in behind the person that’s leading her. And let’s say that I give them the instruction to send her further up. A lot of times when somebody is trying to learn this technique. What will happen is they will use the gas pedal. In this case the whip, and they will send the horse forward. But instead of sending the horse forward and only going from 12in to maybe 11 or 10in behind and releasing their, a lot of times the person’s going to use that whip and actually send the horse blasting past the shoulder.

Speaker1:
So this is where when I think about rocking the teeter totter, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast is because there are times when you’re going to tip the teeter totter from one side to the other from, let’s say, minus three to plus three. But there’s a lot of the time where you’re going to try to gently rock the teeter totter. And this requires you to see that you’re not actually aiming for perfect. So let’s go back to this example. A very common mistake I see when people are trying to teach the horse. This is that they see a horse like Luna that’s a foot behind, and they try to get the horse to close that full gap, to close the gap of 12in. And so in doing so, they send the horse up and let’s say the horse goes a little bit past the shoulder. They send it up kind of quick. And then what they’ll do is then they’ll turn around and be like, oh, you’re not supposed to go past the shoulder. So then they will quickly shut the door in the front or back the horse up. And what starts to happen is the horse starts to get this very trapped feeling.

Speaker1:
So imagine right now if I went faster. Let’s go faster, Luna. And so I’m going faster. And she’s like, okay, I’m trying to find this. I’m trying to catch up with you. I’m trying to catch up with you. And then all of a sudden I stop and quickly go backwards. We can look at that in a few different ways. We can look at that, first of all, as a very quick transition to go from nearly jogging or jogging to a stop and backup is a dramatic transition. How do we know it’s dramatic? Well, first of all, it’s skipping gears. We went from the trot and we skipped right over the walk, and we actually skipped over the stop and we went straight to the backup. So we skipped two gears. So now we know we’re really emphasizing something because anytime you skip gears, you’re emphasizing something. So what we essentially said in a very short sequence was you’re too far behind, catch up. And then because we overapplied the gas pedal and the horse shot forward, then we slam the door and take the horse back. Okay. Can you start to see where if you were the horse in this scenario, you could start to feel rather trapped. So instead, when I’m working on trying to get Luna to close that gap of those 12in, I would rather keep the rule of don’t pass my shoulder and I would rather say come forward. Good job. Now you’re only ten inches behind me.

Speaker1:
Come forward. Good job. Now you’re only ten inches behind me. Wait. How can I do that twice in a row? Because she fell back on her own. She made the mistake or rocked the teeter totter and fell back on her own. Okay. Come forward a little bit more. Okay. Now you’re only eight inches behind me. Good job. See how I’m taking the responsibility of not being the one that shoots her past me? Because I don’t overapply the aid. Now, here’s the second part of that. When I want to stop, if I don’t want to emphasize the stop because I’m mostly working on the catching up right now, another thing I’ll do is I’ll slow, slow, slow, slow and stop. She’s looking at me. Hi. This is a weird day. I’m talking a lot. And so what’s interesting about that is notice that I slowed down very slowly so that I didn’t put a heavy emphasis, just like I said a minute ago, we’re skipping gears. Going from a trot to a backup is skipping two gears, slowing, slowing, slowing, slowing and then stopping gives her a chance to think. And it also makes it more likely she’s not going to feel that trapped feeling if I went through a sudden gear change. The problem with wanting it all to be in balance very early on is it is very common to accidentally create situations where your horse feels very trapped.

Speaker1:
It might feel crystal clear to you that when you’re leading your horse, you want their eye right beside the shoulder. But when the horse is trying to figure out what that is, they need some time to work it out. And if you are constantly creating both mistakes where the horse goes launching past you and the horse doesn’t dare to come up beside you Jew because they’re too far back, so they’re getting in trouble and then they’re too far ahead, so they’re getting in trouble. What begins to happen is you have a horse that just feels like it’s in trouble all the time. And in that case, maybe you need to take a little bit more responsibility for how you rock the teeter totter. One of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast today is because I often find riders want this elusive balance very early in the training. And I find it much more useful to leave the horses unbalanced in certain specific, chosen ways and slowly work towards that balance. In this example with Luna, the specific chosen way that she’s out of balance is she’s a little too far behind me, but I’m not constantly sending her launching past me and then too far behind me, launching past me, and then too far behind me. Instead, I’m leaving her a little bit too far behind me and slowly closing that gap on sending her up. This same thing is true with your legs and your reins.

Speaker1:
So with Luna right now, I’m asking her to come forward. My emphasis is on forward, but not so much that I launch her past, and then I’m subtly slowing down and stopping. So I’m not working a ton on stopping and backing up. If I did that, she’d stay further and further behind me. Instead, I want her at my shoulders so I’m not emphasizing sudden stops and backups. Instead, I’m slowly slowing myself down. I’m subtly slowing myself down. But when I go forward, I’m a little bit quicker on the going forward. And she goes, oh, I should probably catch up here. Oh, I should probably catch up here. So she’s pleasantly looking forward to catching up with me, and she does not feel surprised by sudden stops and back ups. Often what I tell riders is when they go out to do groundwork, I’m looking at the halter and rope as your reins, and I’m looking at the longe whip or the stick and string as your leg, because again, I see the similarities more than I see the differences. If I had one takeaway for you from this podcast, it would be this. When you go out to work with your horse, think, what do you want to emphasize today? What do you want a little more of and what do you want to handle very subtly so you’re not overemphasizing it? Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker2:
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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