Episode 46: 5 Tips for Bringing Up Your Horses Energy

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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 answer a listener question about how to bring up a horse's energy level. Let's get started.

Speaker3:
Hi Stacy, I really am enjoying your podcasts. I have a thoroughbred who's very obedient but seems to lack exuberance. I don't really want to up the energy and use the stick more, which is what causes her to be more exuberant. And I was wondering if you had ideas about how I can up her exuberance without using more not punishing ways. But I'm sure you understand what I mean. Thanks. Loving your podcast.

Speaker2:
Thanks so much for leaving your question. If you have a question that you would like answered, you will find a tab on the right hand side of my website where it's pretty easy to just hit the record button and leave your voicemail right there. To answer this question, I have come up with five tips for bringing up the energy. Number one, be confident that you want a more enthusiastic horse. Number two, be more expressive with your body. Number three create patterns of anticipation. Number four exaggerate the upward transitions. And number five work shorter and more intense sessions. Okay. Well, thanks for joining me today. Glad I answered your question. Just kidding. I'm actually going to go over these in detail. So let's go. Number one be confident that you want a more enthusiastic horse. And what I mean by that is that with little Willow, as I am bringing her energy level up so that I can do higher level maneuvers in western dressage and traditional dressage, I am very aware that there is a piece of me that questions how fiery I want her to be. For example, I know she can be a little bit hotter, a little bit spicier, kind of a horse. And because of that, I know that I have ridden her in a way that has made her obedient and correct, but I also have an awareness in my body that when I bring that energy level up for more enthusiasm, as you wonderfully stated, other things could come out.

Speaker2:
For example, I just remember one time on a young horse running down to a sliding stop and I remember I loped off and I was building speed. And about halfway down the arena I thought, wow, this horse feels so round and elevated and ready. And then the horse just started bucking. Because realistically, what happens when those horses bring up that enthusiasm is especially on a horse that can be really athletic. What you can feel, especially if you have experience with horses bucking or any of those kind of things, you might not want to have experience again. That collection, that real, ultimate energetic collection also happens to be what they do right before they can really buck or some of those other athletic things that we don't want them to do. So be confident that you really, truly want that more enthusiastic horse. Because as I am bringing up Willow's energy, I know that on certain days I can feel where I think she's maybe a little less mentally stable on that day. And I'm like, yeah, maybe I'm not going to bring your energy level really high. But realistically, I'm starting to do some canter pirouette work to work up towards that, and that takes quite a bit of energy balled up and directed in a specific direction. And I realized that I am going to go through this process of re questioning myself whether or not mm. Is today a good day to bring up all that energy or not? The very horses that it's that you're trying to bring this energy up in.

Speaker2:
Sometimes if you look back, you might have a history, maybe not with this horse, but with a different horse. And you'll realize maybe there's a piece of me that's riding them a little bit flat. And just to close that out, I know that I personally ride some horses a little bit flat because I don't trust them yet. So, for example, when I'm starting Colts, I don't often try to preserve all the energy right off the bat, if especially if they feel really, really naturally athletic. Some of these little reining horses, they can roll back, slide, spin, they can move in five different directions all at the same time. And it's really difficult to stay on them. So a lot of times I am rewarding them for being a little more sluggish than what I'm going to want later on. But I'm very aware that I'm doing that because I do want to build that obedient foundation. So good for you for already having that. Now you'll get to question how much enthusiasm you want to bring up. So just give that a thought. By the way, that would fit into the writer's mind quadrant. And now we're moving on to the next one. Be more expressive with your body. Can you hear how that fits into the writer's body quadrant? What I mean by me, by being more expressive with your body is watch that your body isn't super tight and precise, because a lot of times when people are describing using a whip or a stick to bring up more energy, a lot of times if I watch that rider riding, they will be very rigid and tight in their body, and the only thing really trying to bring up that energy is that stick where just imagine that you put this little kid that was used to riding, you know, really high energy barrel horses going into the arena and you tossed them up on your horse.

Speaker2:
They would have a very loose, confident, and the way they would move their body wouldn't necessarily be as precise. And what's very interesting is that some of what you do with your body and your mind is going to be reflected, hopefully, ideally in your horse's body and mind. So it is quite the trick to be able to bring up that energy level, remain loose in your body as you're doing this, and yet have that excitement. And for me, one of the best memories I have of doing this is I remember when I was a teenager and I had my barrel horse, and I would go out and I would ride, and I could actually get her to the point where I knew what was coming. So I'm going to talk about this in the next in the next tip.

Speaker2:
But I knew what was coming and my heart would start pounding. And I rode bareback all the time and I could feel myself getting excited, heart racing, starting to get that little sweat on the palms because I knew what I was going to ask her to do next, and I would actually feel her heart beat because I was bareback. I could feel her heart beat going up. And this is the kind of thing where we want these horses connected to us. But this also means that if you want your horse to be more expressive, maybe you need to make some videos of yourself riding and seeing if you're being expressive with your body. Now, I'll grant you that when you watch dressage, it doesn't look like a high level of expression, but if you actually watch that dressage video, their body is moving more than you think when you're watching the overview. So their body is so in sync. There's not a locked up feeling. And that's very challenging to get to, because I've already figured out that when I'm trying to get some of these bigger movements on Little Willow, I've got to make sure that I let my hips swing and that I let some of my body move more because otherwise I'm holding back her expression. That's what I'm talking about. Tip number three was create patterns of anticipation. And I'm going to go more into detail about that heart racing thing that I used to do with my mare.

Speaker2:
And what I'm going to call this is I'm going to call this a pattern of positive anticipation. When I would go out and ride my mare, there were spots when we were out riding where there was really good footing, either on a back road that was dirt or on the side of the road. And as kids we would race our horses. So what ended up happening was that we only had a certain number of places where we could really race each other side by side or run the horses up the side of the road. And I'm not encouraging you to all do this. I'm just telling you about my childhood. And what would happen is that when we got to these certain areas, as we were approaching these areas, my heart would start racing and her heart would start racing. And there was this heart racing thing and we were all worked up before we even turned the corner to where the good footing was. And what this is telling us is that there was this positive pattern of anticipation. Now I had it all going for me because we had good footing and we had another horse to race with, and so it was very natural for my horse to get kind of worked up about this head to head race. I'm really telling you, I really did read the Black Stallion books way too many times. And so we would race our horses neck and neck.

Speaker2:
And so we were definitely turning up that adrenaline, and we were creating this positive anticipation of these spots. So it wasn't taking a whip to get the horse worked up. It was this over and over again thing that we were doing, the way that I use a much more controlled version of this. Now is that especially working on like my western dressage or dressage right now, I use the diagonal across the arena, which happens to be a really common place in a lot of the tests to do a lengthening. So that could be like the lengthening in the trot. We'll use that as an example. So for quite a while on my horses, what I'll do is I'll ride all kinds of different patterns around the arena. Meaning like sometimes I'm doing circles, 20 meter circles moving down the arena, and other times I'm going kind of straight down what we'd call on the track or following the rail. Well, for a time period, every time I turn across that diagonal, that long diagonal of the arena, I lengthen every single time. And what happens is, if you do that, where consistently, every time you take that longer line across the diagonal, you always lengthen and speed up there. What begins to happen is it doesn't. It depends on the horse whether it's going to be, you know, ten times later or ten days later or, you know, a month later.

Speaker2:
But at some point, the horse is going to recognize that when you come around that corner, when you go deep in and you take that turn out onto the diagonal, you're going to feel that horse engage to go, because it's going to be anticipation of this pattern that you've created about always going, lengthening across the diagonal. And because of it being like a lengthen across a diagonal, not like jumping out of a starting gate. You're going to have this gradual build to where the horse anticipates it. If you super exaggerate this, then you literally take a horse from a standstill to a run. But I don't encourage you to do that unless you really know what you're doing, because basically it's I'd rather have you do it through this anticipation of the pattern versus the heavy, heavy anticipation of, you know, going blasting down the arena because you could just stand at one end of the arena, look at the other end and just blast down through there. And this is what you'll see a lot of times, like back when I was barrel racing, that's what started to happen at the in gate to the arena is the horses start to realize that in this magnetic area of the inner gate, sometimes we are standing here and then we blast off. And so the horses, you have to understand what you're doing when you start really amping things up to that extreme, because it can have some other effects.

Speaker2:
You want to make sure everything's balanced. So just dialing this back down to the lengthened trot example, you will start to notice if you become very consistent with that pattern of anticipation across there, you will begin to see that that horse, even if you just come around the corner and you're trotting a speed of four and you increase it to a speed of five, as long as you do that every time, what will start to happen is the horse will start to be like, oh, we always speed up here. And because I'm doing it in this more gradual, not just blasting them around, what you'll end up getting is you'll end up getting this horse that will be like, hey, I think we go faster here, and you can you can say, yes, we do. Or if it starts to become a problem, let's say you do this for I'd said, you know, maybe it takes a horse a month. Well, that would also mean that if you started doing it for a couple months, they could actually start tipping the teeter totter the other way, and they could start getting a little bit too worked up, and then you just dial it back a little bit. But you for sure were saying that your horse is on the lazier side. So I think you would notice quite a bit of benefit if you picked a pattern like that, that every time I go across the diagonal, I'm going to speed up until you start asking the question about, oh, I think speeding up is coming.

Speaker2:
And then the number four tip for you was exaggerate the upward transitions. So this one's a little bit trickier. And what this means is that you're going to do a lot of upward transitions. So the better you get your upward transition. Walk to lope walk to trot. You've got to make sure that you exaggerate the release on the upward and that you also maybe it's easier to think about it like this, that you take some extra time on the downward. Because here's the deal. Every time that somebody says practice a lot of upward transitions, it's like, well, I think if I want to do a lot of upward transitions, I'm probably gonna have to do a lot of downward transitions or this just doesn't end well. So what I mean by this is when I say exaggerate the release on the upward, that means you've got to think about how do I make that upward, something that he feels like he gets the reward for. And how do I make the downward a little less appealing? Here's how. So let's say you're walking and you ask him to go to a trot. And so you go wave, wave, wave. You take him up to a trot, and then you let him go along for a little bit. And then when you slow him down, you're going to slow him down.

Speaker2:
And as soon as he goes into the walk, he's going to go walk, step, walk, step, walk, step. And you're going to take him right back up to the trot. And so he's going to start to get longer rewards up in the trot. So maybe he gets to trot for 30 steps or 18 steps or whatever number you pick. But maybe when he comes down to the walk he only walks for three steps, two steps, four steps, a short number, and then you go straight back up into it. And what happens is he starts to question. He'll start to be like, I know I'm going to slow down, but I'm going to go right back up again. And so that's what I mean by exaggerate the upward release. And tip number five was work shorter, more intense sessions. So let's just take this to a full blown extreme and then dial it back. Let's just say that every day you mount it up on your horse and ran up the road and then got off and walked home. So very short ride. Maybe this was five minutes of riding and and five, ten minutes of walking home. So how long do you think it would take before your horse would be dancing when you went to mount up? Mount up. Blast off. Get off. Walk home, be done. It wouldn't take very long with any horse before that horse would be really dancey.

Speaker2:
You can just picture this in your head. This is not a recommendation people. This is not a recommendation. This is an exaggeration. But sometimes it's easier to look at an exaggerated version and then think, how can I add a little bit of this to my current work plan? So what that would mean is that sometimes people are very diligent about following the clock, meaning that they want to ride for 45 minutes or an hour. So they kind of have like, I'm going to do 45 minutes of training. And what will happen is that the horse, this less exuberant horse, for example, might come out and he might be correct, but he actually might be fairly exuberant for the first 10 or 15 minutes. But because there's this timer running in the rider's mind, they go ahead and ride on. And so this somewhat exuberant, slightly leaning towards exuberant horse for the first 15 minutes keeps going. And then in that next 15 to 30 minute segment, he gets a little bit more tired physically and he's questioning where the end is. And then in that very last 15 minutes of that 30 minute to 45 minute, because this rider is riding 45 minutes, he really gets kind of lucky because he's tired and he's really longing for the end and he's just doesn't have great endurance. And what happens is that that's when the rider gets off. And so he actually is getting rewarded for the lack of exuberance.

Speaker2:
One of the quickest ways to change that is to get on and do a really short ride. So if I've got a horse that I really want to teach to be more up, especially if I've already got the control and they're very obedient, is to get on and and be like, okay, great, I got a lot done in 15 minutes. I'm going to get off and they're like, wow, you just got off. That's super cool. And so you actually reward that exuberance and if you want you can get off, you can go hand graze them, you can go give them a little break. And if you wanted to you could get back on. I especially for maybe let's say 4 or 5 rides in a row, ideally inside of one week. I might really just play that up and only legitimately do a 15 minute ride, because I actually want that horse to be like, whoa. So it's going to play on both sides. It's going to play on their physical strength that they really only had to go for 15 minutes. So they really can give you more because it's just not as long a time frame and not as physically demanding. And it's going to mentally play up the idea that they were kind of on the fresher side to begin with. And so they could give you a little bit more. And sometimes once you take the time to just instill that over a 4 or 5 day period, you'll notice a pretty big jump in their enthusiasm to come out and go to work, because they know it's going to be a really short session.

Speaker2:
And a lot of times I'll do that work for me when I'm headed towards a show, like at the end of the year, like it is right now for me, where the horses are pretty obedient. They've been going along. They're very physically fit to the point where, you know, it's like me right now. It's it is September. And I am questioning, like, I didn't really think I wanted it to snow this year, but snow is starting to sound like a down time. And so there is a piece of me that's a little bit tired, even though fall is absolutely my favorite time of year. So sometimes these short work cycles work really well when you've had a long season, and that's one of the time periods that I'll use it. But I also really embrace the idea that there's other times of the year when my horses need long physical work cycles to be able to build up that strength, because you can't just ride a horse 15 minutes and really build that base strength that they need to be able to physically do some of the stuff that we want them to express. For example, a Canter pirouette that just flat takes some strength and exuberance. To wrap it all up, I'd like to close with an idea that you mentioned in your question about not wanting to use the stick more, and the quickest way to get away from using the stick is to be consistent with your follow through, and to use positive anticipation like I outlined earlier.

Speaker2:
What I mean by the follow through is that you can occasionally increase the intensity, which might feel like using the stick more, but what I usually find is that often the person that doesn't want to have to follow through is in the habit of helping too much, which sets up the whole escalating cycle. For example, a lot of times people that don't want to follow through will often when they're lunging their horse, they'll whip the ground behind the horse so they'll whip the ground behind. And in the beginning, maybe that works because the horse moves away from that energy source. But what happens over time is they effectively teach the horse to ignore the whipping on the ground. So there's times that I'll see people that are lunging their horse, and the horse goes out and starts walking and they want them to trot, and these people are beating on the ground behind the horse, and the horse is walking. And a lot of times what's really interesting is they're not just walking relaxed, they almost look a little bit cocky. They almost have a little bit of a snarky attitude, like, because they do actually understand that there is no chance of follow through.

Speaker2:
And so what ends up happening is these horses actually can get this attitude towards the idea of it even happening, because it literally never gets followed through to. And I know sometimes people get a little bit funny about the idea of, you know, using the whips because of mentally what they have that mean. So how about if I illustrate this in a completely different way out in the herd? And a few years ago I had the opportunity, and I really wish I had pulled out my phone and videotaped it, but I didn't. And now I regret it. But a few years ago, we had four horses that were all turned out in a big pasture together, and we were going out to bring them in. And three of the horses belonged to us, and one belonged to the property owner. And what was really funny was this outside outsider horse. The horse that wasn't part of our herd was lined up right with ours, but at the very end of the line. So it's like horse one, two, three and four and horse number four is not ours. And that horse was right next to my husband's mare. And I'm talking like, easy touching distance. I mean, there was not enough room to pull another horse up in between them. They were all just kind of lined up. But this outsider horse was they'd been turned out together for a few weeks at this point, but this horse was pinning its ears and shaking its head and baring its teeth and swinging all kinds of body parts around.

Speaker2:
And it was so funny because if you would look just at her, you would have thought she was really doing something. And if you looked at my husband's mare, she had the cutest expression, because she always does when we're going to catch her. Her ears were all pricked forward, and she just looked like she was smiling and the sweetest thing in the world. And right beside her is this horse pinning and snapping and biting and doing all of this stuff. But you know what she did? She was all bark and literally no bite. So my husband's mare was like, I can totally ignore this horse because even though she's swinging her head and pinning her ears and biting the air and curling her lips and swishing her tail, and even though she's very close to me, she has no follow through. So I'm completely fine. And that's what happens when you handle your horse without follow through. In next week's podcast, I'm going to go into detail about how to unlock and lock certain traits in your horse. And this is going to apply to making hot horses cooler and calm horses a little bit more expressive. And it's a really neat concept that I use with all my upper level horses, and I'm super excited to share it with you. And it's going to fit perfectly together with this podcast.

Speaker1:
Supporting companies make this show sustainable. Thank you.

Speaker2:
I would again like to thank Equa thrive for sponsoring this podcast. If you're listening, the week that this episode airs, I am in Oklahoma with my horses at the Western Dressage World Show. I've been documenting my progress with Willow and Gabby all year through YouTube videos, and now it's finally here, the Western Dressage World show. One of the things that I packed into my trailer before leaving home was my equa Aqua Thrive Pelleted electrolytes. It's going to be in the 80s upper 80s while I am down there showing the horses and back in episode 38. Doctor Marney explained the importance of electrolytes for cooling and oxygenating the horse and that no, those white salt blocks aren't quite enough. If you'd like to learn more about Equine thrive and the products that I'm using, you can visit equine Thrive.com. If you decide to purchase something, use the word Stacy Stacy in the checkout to receive 10% off plus free shipping. Thanks again for listening and 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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