Episode 346.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
If you’ve ever wondered, how can I reward my horse without stopping the flow of the ride? You asked that question because you were recognizing the flaw in relying primarily on long pauses.
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.
Speaker1:
Hi, I’m Stacy Westfall and I’m here to help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. Here’s what’s on my mind. Why I’ve been thinking about it and how it impacts you. Today I want to talk about the power of pausing. Every week I coach riders one on one in my advance at home program. That means that I meet with each of them personally, privately, and I always find it interesting when I see trends across different horses and riders. It’s even more fun when I see the trend showing up in different areas. So ridden versus groundwork or different types of groundwork. So what I noticed recently was with three separate students. Then I started seeing it everywhere, but with three particular students, I noticed something that is actually a nice follow up to last week’s podcast on Teaching Focus. And what I noticed after working with all three of these students individually, was that what I was teaching them was the power of pausing. Now, pausing can mean different things to different people, and it can mean different lengths of time. So let’s define that a little bit more. The pause I’m talking about here is one of the most important pauses that a rider or handler can learn, and it’s the pause that happens in motion. Before I explain that more. Let’s acknowledge some of the other lengths of pausing. I know that personally, there are times when I start something like cleaning out a closet, and as I get deeper and deeper into the project, I realize that I need to hit pause.
Speaker1:
For me, that can mean anything from pausing until the next day or the next weekend. Or sometimes it means putting things back together and pausing the project to an undetermined amount of time. So unset future date in any of these cases. Let’s call that a long pause. With horses and riders, when they are first learning, it’s often helpful to use exercises or techniques that can be a single standalone thing with a beginning and an end. For example, the idea of asking a horse to back up. Whether you think about that as ridden or groundwork, you could actually ask a horse to take a step back, and then you could pause and reward them. That pause could vary in time, but it’s unlikely to be as long a pause as my closet cleaning, or I hope it’s not. So, depending on what’s being taught. That length of the pause can vary. So when I’m teaching people, for example, to reward the verbal quo, I often teach them that if the horse did it really well, I want them to stand for the length of their favorite song. Next time you listen to your favorite song, check out the length of it. But they’re usually going to be minutes long. The pause that I was teaching to these students in these individual settings was a different type of pause, and I want you to think of this as the pause you might hear in a song.
Speaker1:
On some of the most powerful songs I can think of. Contain a pause. Think about in music how the song will dip and rise, and it has moments of near. Pause. Or some songs contain actual silence. In 2011, the song that I chose to ride my freestyle to was from the movie The Titanic. It was the Celine Dion song My Heart Will Go On, and one of the reasons I loved that song was for that moment of suspension, about three quarters of the way through. I choreographed that ride with my horse Vaccaro, so that my horse would be walking during that moment of near quiet with the song. And then when the song rose again, quickly and dramatically, I then transitioned quickly into his spins at that very end of that suspended moment, the pause that happens in a song. The pause that happens in a song is a much more skillful pause than the long, drawn out pause that I associate with earlier training phases with the horse. Imagine a song with a 15 second pause, and you’ll notice that you’re not actually imagining a song anymore. That’s the difference between elementary school and high school or college. It doesn’t mean that when you get to high school or college that long pauses are completely gone. But what it does mean is that shorter pauses, or these moments of suspension become a much bigger part of the training. If you’ve ever wondered, how can I reward my horse without stopping the flow of the ride? You asked that question because you were recognizing the flaw in relying primarily on long pauses.
Speaker1:
If you pause too long, when you start again, you’re not necessarily continuing the same conversation. Okay. Here are the three examples from my students that brought this to my mind. So one student was working on trailer loading. Now this was with a horse that had a very confirmed trailer loading problem, as in years of a trailer loading issue. The horse even had stitches and actual injury from past trailering experiences. Now, the majority of the training that took place for this horse and handler inside the program was a way from the trailer. It was the beginning part of the parts and pieces that would be needed for successful trailer loading. Done away from the trailer and it involved long pauses. Breaks in between these clear building blocks of communication, because those bigger pauses tell you different things than the shorter pauses that I’m talking about right now. Then, when the horse and the handler became more practiced still away from the trailer, the work began to take on more flow, more of this dance, more of this musical feeling. That’s when we took it to the trailer, when the horse and the handler were ready to dance. So in order for a person to answer a horse’s questions in real time in a situation like trailer loading. If the horse especially wants to rush, then you need to be able to figure out how you’re going to dance well and build in those pauses.
Speaker1:
So you need to answer the questions As quickly as the horse will ask them. Without you speeding up to the point where you’re firing directions at the horse. That is such a big thing. Let me try saying it again. When a horse starts asking you questions quickly, can you answer the question quickly and with good timing without you then becoming stuck in that speed? Can you then drop back down to hold a pause in your body? In order to be able to do this dance? You will need to be able to feel that moment of pause, that moment of release or suspension, which requires an awareness on your part. This example of the pause at the trailer is a little bit longer. Pause a little bit closer to that true pause where you might see an actual pause of several seconds at a moment, but I actually kept this horse and handler in motion much more, because the horse had questions that needed to be answered in gentle motion, as opposed to those long, drawn out pauses of the earlier stage. That was such a fun session with that student, because it’s now been several weeks, and the horse that was taking a very long time to load is now down to less than two minutes. Two minutes was the maximum long time since that session, and it’s just been maintainable and maintainable and maintainable. Because when you learn how to hold this pause, it is amazing what is unlocked.
Speaker1:
Okay, the next example was a student who was again doing groundwork, who was working with a horse that had a habit of looking to the outside and pulling away. During groundwork, They again have been learning the individual building blocks one at a time. But in this session she was learning how to dance with him in groundwork. When I’m working with a horse, it feels like I’m working with energy and it feels to me like a push energy and a pull energy that can come from me and technically from the horse also. So I want to make sure that I’m able to push that horse onto a larger circle or build bigger space between myself and the horse. But I also want to be able to do moves that draw the horse back into me. And preferably this can all be done with subtle cues. Eventually, I want this to be able to be done at liberty. So it becomes this dance of two bodies. Or for me, it feels even more like a dance of these two energies that are interacting with each other. Now, this horse, in my opinion, was pulling away because he had It internalized too much of that push energy. He either didn’t know how to recognize the pull energy or he just didn’t recognize at all. So either he hadn’t been trained to recognize pull energy or pull energy. That drawing him back in energy hadn’t been used with him. So because we’d been doing the individual pieces that contained both that push energy and that pull or draw energy.
Speaker1:
On this particular day, I showed her how to flow between the push energy and the pull energy. And then this is where it gets even more fun to me in the middle, between the push and the pull. There’s a moment of pause or suspension in between the two. And for me, when I’m doing groundwork or the rider and I get to this stage, I love how engaged the horse gets because push energy. Think about it from the horse’s point of view. If someone’s always pushing you away, at some point you’re going to be thinking away and that doesn’t really have a lot of engagement. And pull energy is great until you end up with a 1,200 pound horse on top of you all the time, and then you’re going to wish you had more push energy. But one of the most beautiful dance steps in groundwork is the pause in between either pushing or pulling, because that’s where you can become really interesting without even moving. Because that pause. Think about someone dancing and they’re turning around because that’s how it feels when I’m doing groundwork with the horse. And imagine that you’ve been taking forward steps and backward steps, and then you have a moment where you’re suspended in motion. And that pause leaves a question in the horse’s mind of, what move are you about to make next? That is interesting. That is powerful. So the final example was actually a ridden one.
Speaker1:
And this particular student has been working on collection. And collection is a higher level concept, and I’m going to explain it crudely here because it’s going to make more sense in your mind if I do it, but I promise it’s much more beautifully dance like like my earlier example. But collection is a higher level concept that contains both push and pull energy, pushing the horse forward, meaning using the legs, sending the horse forward, and then contact that shapes the horse. That would be the reins and that would be a pull energy. Or as they would say in dressage, it would be recycling the energy. Okay, so the pull energy can be viewed in a couple different ways. Primarily, it actually does involve pulling on the reins. Now again, I’m using crude phrasing so I can stick with it so you can follow the thinking. But I’m actually not opposed to pulling on the reins. If we’re about to jump in front of a semi truck, you might want to know how to pull on the reins and stop the horse. It’s very clear now if I’m riding horse bridles, I technically am still using this pull energy. It’s just moved up to a much higher level, so I for sure contain push and pull energy, more push energy, and more pull energy in my core and in my legs when I’m riding bridles, because at that point, the pull energy can’t be in my reins because I don’t have reins.
Speaker1:
It’s just a lot more sophisticated. But when I’m thinking about this push in, this pull that’s dance between the rider’s hands and the legs. One thing you’ve heard me talk about here on the podcast is the idea of a hug. So this student was doing this work with me and using her hands and her legs to close and to hug the horse for the moment and then release. Now listen to this. In this description, the rider was using the hands and legs to close and hug and then release. In that description, where do you think the pause is? The writer was using the hands and legs to close and hug and then release. Where is the pause? Is it in the moment when all the aides are closed? Or is it in the moment when all the aids are released? Yeah, I actually expect you to answer that because this is how you learn. If you answer it right now, even though I’m not there listening to you, you will know what answer you gave before you hear my answer. So one more time is the pause in your head. Does it come when all the aids are closed, or does it come at the moment when all the aids are released? My answer is I think it’s in both. I think the closing pause has one effect and the releasing pause has another effect. And together they make the dance close for too long and the horse has no feedback loop open for too long and the horse has a lack of support.
Speaker1:
I said at the beginning of the podcast, I wanted to explain what was on my mind, why it was on my mind, and how it impacts you. This impacts you because many of you are either missing some of the foundation pieces, so your music is never going to be music because it’s missing something, or you keep playing the individual notes or learning the individual dance steps with really long pauses in between, and you’re not putting it together into a song or into a dance. I’ll close with this. There’s a very common phrase in horsemanship that says it’s the release that teaches. The pause I’m talking about here is closely related to this. Unfortunately, the word release tends to make the human think full stop, full removal. There is a time and a place for that. But the day that you can see the pause or the suspension or the momentary release inside of the dance with your horse, where the music doesn’t stop. But it does contain that pause. That’s when everything you’re doing will go to the next level. Thanks for listening to what was on my mind, and I really do hope that it impacts you with your horse. Feel free to email me your thoughts. What you put into action or the questions that you have. It always helps me to hear how these episodes land with you, the listener. And thanks again for listening. 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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