Resistance, Acceptance, Compliance, and Commitment - Four words to help you better define and organize your training process.

            Whether you ride your horse competitively or for pleasure riding, you will be communicating with him, or, “telling him what to do” through the use of cues. How much control you have over your horse is dependent upon the length of time it takes for him to respond to your cue, and, how completely he responds to it. For many people, the confusing aspect of teaching cues is in knowing whether or not the horse really understands what you want. Did he completely respond, or did he just “stumble through it”? Most importantly, did he learn it?

When teaching something new to most any horse, the rider/trainer will encounter 4 separate phases with respect to his/her horse’s learning process. These 4 phases can be represented by the words that best describe them. They are: Resistance, Acceptance, Compliance, and Commitment.

I like to separate these phases and label them with descriptive words because when I’m training, these words help to keep me on track and knowing how well my horse has learned something.

The first stage, resistance, is fairly self-explanatory. When introducing a new cue, your horse will have to move away from some type of pressure. Depending upon how well broke your horse is, this type of pressure may be somewhat familiar, or completely foreign, and the resistance you meet will correspond.

Horses can demonstrate resistance either actively or passively. If your horse’s response is passive, he may simply ignore your request. If his response is active, he may physically move into the pressure, or get angry and aggressively move into the pressure by kicking (if you are using a leg or a crop), or tossing his head (if you are mainly using your hands). The key to getting past the resistance phase is to start very lightly, with whatever cue you are building, and very patiently, yet persistently keep applying the cue until you get a response that you can “pay” your horse for. The payment that you give will take the form of the absence of pressure. If, after several applications you still are not getting a yes, make sure that you change the set-up of your exercise so that it increasingly becomes more non-confrontational. For example, for a horse that kicks at the whip, instead of holding both reins evenly and asking for the horse to go straight forward into the bridle off of the whip, try simply positioning his head off center by 8-12 inches using mostly one rein, and before you tap him, rub the whip on his hip for a minute or so, until he accepts it. Once he has accepted being touched, use a leg to move his hip over. As the horse begins to accept this, leg him over again and, as he moves his hip, tap it with the whip. At this point you already have his agreement to move his hip away from pressure, the two of you are merely “discussing” what type of pressure is acceptable. More than likely, the horse will move his hip away from the whip after you have his agreement that he will accept being touched by the whip.

As you have read the preceding paragraph, you may have already realized that moving from the resistance phase to the acceptance phase is really just figuring out an approach that incorporates what you want to accomplish with an application that is appropriate for your horse’s attitude or state of mind on that particular day.

The acceptance phase is really easy to define and notice. Either your horse is accepting, and dealing with your attempts to teach him something new, or he is not. Moving from resistance to acceptance may not take any time at all, depending on your approach. With any given exercise (as indicated in the example above) you may opt for a more non- confrontational approach that involves more steps in order to get what you want. It may at first seem that taking an additional step is wasting time, however, for some horses, doing an easy exercise that is related to the ultimate goal can be a real confidence booster. The acceptance phase is finished when it no longer upsets your horse for you to touch him in a new way or place on his body.

Compliance is the next phase and once again, it is fairly easy to recognize. A horse is in compliance if he has accepted the touch that it takes to establish a new cue or response, and he more or less attempts to do it. He may not be doing exactly what you want, but it is an attempt. As an example, let’s use the situation that we used before, that of kicking at the whip. The first phase of resistance was over come by interrupting a conditioned response (kicking) by breaking the entire pattern up into steps. Step 1 was to present the horse with an indirect positioning of the bit (an off-set hold). Step 2 was to use leg pressure to ask him to move his hip while simply laying the whip on his hip. Step 3 was to repeat asking the horse to move his hip off of leg pressure, and as he agreed to do that, tap him lightly on his hip with the whip. What actually happened is that the rider put the horse into the state of compliance when he repeated the leg yield. By adding the tap on his hip, the horse reached acceptance of the whip while he complied with the leg pressure. Step 4, or compliance to the whip will come when the horse simply moves over from the pressure of being tapped by the whip without the leg to help him. To be in compliance from the whip, the horse does not have to move much. This may not be all that the rider expected from his horse, but that’s ok. What is important is that the rider did not receive a “no” response, and in addition, the horse did move and did something different from his old pattern of kicking. Compliance, then, has been reached when a horse predictably tries to do what has been asked. At this point the rider does not have to wonder, “Will this horse move from this pressure”, because that has been established. Instead, the new thought will be, “I wonder how well I can get him to do this”.

It is after this phase, and only after this phase, that a committed response can be reached.

A committed response is also fairly easy to interpret. A horse giving a committed response will do so in a contemplated and deliberate manner. He will demonstrate his willingness to comply with no hesitation. Commitment occurs when a horse knows his job and he is aware that you know that he knows. This play on words may sound like a laughable situation, but in truth, when a horse knows that you know that he knows his job, he will no longer hesitate or “cheat” because he is aware that that is useless. A horse gives a committed response when he makes his own decision to respond in a certain way, even though he may be presented with an opportunity to respond differently. For the horse, this act of making the decision, and, most importantly, the trainer giving the horse the opportunity to make a choice is critical to the learning process. Only after a horse has made his own choice, and been rewarded for it, has true learning been achieved.

So, how is this article useful? For me, it is a way of organizing my work with a horse so that on any given day I know where I’m at with respect to the progress of my horse. If I quit a lesson before a horse has completely learned something, I am aware of how much more there is to teach. For instance, how many times have you thought that you taught your horse something and the next day, when you try to use what you taught him, he reacts as if he doesn’t know much about it? When this occurs, what probably has happened is that the learning that occurred the day before didn’t get past the acceptance phase. By understanding this at the time of training, I’m already aware of what my horse is likely to retain, and I’m not only not surprised the next day, I’m more prepared because I had the time to think about my approach for the next lesson. Organizing my thinking in this manner also helps me “get a read” on a new horse. As I warm a new horse up, I keep track of what a horse knows, and how well he seems to know it. By categorizing the responses, I know where to begin so that I don’t skip any important steps and try to teach him something that he is not ready for. For me, an organized approach to training is what enables me to get complete and lasting results. Using words to describe stages of learning helps me to temper my approach to be more in line with the thinking of my horse. Try this method and I’ll bet you start seeing more complete results out of your training sessions!

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