Here’s something that you can go outside, grab your horse, put on a halter – on the horse – and practice anytime that you feel like it. Maybe it just rained and you can’t ride right now… This is something perfect for you to try.
What I want you to do is this: I want you to go out, put a halter on your horse and for the next twenty minutes, I want you to keep your horse moving. Fluidly. Forward, backwards, left, right… any direction that you can think of. But what I want you to do is take the hesitation out of any of the transitional moments. Okay? Be thinking: If you’re gonna go forward and then you’re going to go backward, I want there to be no stop.
Just picture Fred and Ginger dancing, okay? There’s always movement. They’re always moving at the same speed, at the same pace whether they go forward or they go backward, it’s always the same pace. That’s what you need to teach your horse, because I can guarantee you, dollars to donuts, most folks can keep their horses going fluidly left, right, backwards, forwards.
Here’s all you’ve got to do if your horse stalls out… and I guarantee you, most horses out there are going to do it… all you have to do is, the moment that that horse stops, you connect the nose to the tail and get him moving again, okay? If you move his nose far enough, he is going to get moving again.
Let’s say I’m walking this horse forward, alright? And the horse stalls out. All I have to do is connect the nose to the tail and the horse keeps moving. And I keep moving him forward and then I ask it to move backwards… If the horse stalls out when I ask it to move backwards, I don’t hesitate. I need to move the butt around by connecting the nose to the tail. S
Your goal is to get out there and move non-stop for thirty seconds, and then non-stop for two minutes, and work your way up to twenty minutes. This is a learning experience more for you than for the horse. What you need to concentrate on is whether or not that horse hesitates in those in-between moments, in those transitional moments. And as soon as you feel any sort of hesitation, you need to automatically try something to get that horse moving. Your big brain needs to understand “Hey, the horse is about to slow up; it’s about to balk. What am I going to do?” and you need to be prepared for it.
Why do you need to know this? Why do you need to practice this? Because eventually your goal, a well-trained horse, it should feel to you as if you’re riding a giant ball where the horse can roll to the left, roll to the right… He can roll forward and backward without any hesitation whatsoever. That’s kind of what they mean when they say “collected.” Okay? “Collection” is a fancy way of saying “The horse has got a lot of energy balled up like a jack-in-the-box” and he can roll or move in any direction that you require without a moment’s hesitation. This is one of the things that you need to understand, that your… that your brain needs to understand in order to make you a better rider. So, go out there and try it.
