Training Tips

October Trainer’s Tip  Separate your cues and responses to obtain your best results!

        Have you ever been in a situation where your horse, or horses, seem to have hit a “plateau” and are unable to make as much progress, work to work, as in the past? This is really a rhetorical question because, if you train or ride horses long enough, you undoubtedly already have, or will, reach this unavoidable impasse. And it’s a frustrating experience! If this situation occurs preceding a horse show, it can also be devastating to your results.

        There can be many reasons for “hitting the wall”, however, one of the most common ones is that of information overload on the part of your horse. What is information overload, and how can you tell that it is happening?

        Describing what it is and how to cure it is relatively easy. Knowing when it is occurring can sometimes be difficult as this can be an insidious problem.

        Information overload is simply a flood of information, or cues, that your horse either can’t decipher, or confuses him to the point that he gives you a response that wasn’t quite correct. The devious part of this problem is that he may give you a response that wasn’t bad enough to correct and wasn’t good enough to really pay him for. Information overload most commonly occurs when you are working past the basic training stage and are working with frames or other moves that require changes of balance. This stands to reason for most intermediate and advanced work is accomplished through the use of multiple cues.

        If you are familiar with the Accel system, you will know that I consider all training to be periods of time in which you will be having a dialogue with your horse using pressure as your common language. Each aid, such as rein pressure, seat pressure, leg pressure, and pressure coming from a tap from a crop, can be considered as a line of communication. As an easy explanation of information overload, let’s imagine that each aid is like having a telephone line to your horse. If you are attempting a complicated maneuver involving multiple cues, your horse has, in effect, as many as five telephones ringing at once! Your horse then has to decide in sequence, which phones are the most important to answer. He then must remember to keep doing what the last phone told him to do while he answers the next one. And he has to do it instantly! With humans in today’s workplace, if this situation was continually repeated, the frazzled employee would eventually just quit trying. It’s the same with horses, and the outcome is a horse that generally feels slightly to very numb. 

        What generally causes this situation are cues that are given too quickly, or what I like to call a “training tempo” that is too rapid. Often times, one cue will be applied, and before the horse is mentally ready for more information, still another cue is given. This is generally a sign that the rider/trainer is in too big of a hurry, or is unsure of how to ask the horse for a particular move or gait. This type of training pattern is not only confusing to the horse, it is a pattern that is almost exactly opposite of an optimum learning situation. Let me explain!

        After a cue is given, a horse must make a decision, and act on that decision. In other words, he will have to make a choice to either comply with the request, or not. If he chooses the wrong response, an appropriate correction from the rider is necessary. If he chooses to comply, payment for his work, the absence of pressure, should be immediate. The timing of the reward is extremely important. The more immediate the reward, the more specifically the rider has communicated to his horse the exact nature of what he wanted. If the rider is late with the reward, the horse will have done something well, and then moved on into something else when the reward occurs, and the reward loses it’s meaning. The reward, or absence of pressure, gives them the confidence and incentive to repeat whatever they were doing at the time of the reward!
 As well, if the horse is in the process of making a decision and another cue is given, he will have responded to a “dirty” cue instead of a cue that was “clean” and separate. This situation is what leads to information overload.

        The point of this is that the rider must give the horse time enough to sort through the cue and the opportunity to make a choice to give the right or the wrong response. Once the horse has made a correct choice on his own, and has received a reward for it, true learning will have occurred. No learning really occurs if the rider is helping a horse to the extent that the response wasn’t really the horse’s idea. In other words, if you help your horse too much, you will always have to help him and he will always wait to be helped.

        What does this mean for you? It means that the first step in avoiding information overload it is to keep any training situation simple and well defined. Try to set your exercise up so that the response that you want is really the only one possible. Also, make sure that you are perfectly clear on what you want, how you will ask for it, and what your response will be when you get it. I like to say that you should explain it to yourself like you would explain it to a six-year-old child. If you could explain the situation so completely that a child would have no problem doing it, you are ready to do it yourself!

        The next step in avoiding information overload goes hand in hand with recognizing it. This step has to do with the concept of a horse simply doing “one thing right”.  For example, when I step on a trained horse that I am evaluating for the first time, I will ask that horse a series of questions in an attempt to find out what he knows. I will do this by using my legs to ask him to move each quarter while walking forward in a series of circles. As I do this I will notice not only his body response from my legs, but also how he handles the bridle while I’m doing this. What I commonly find are horses that do not specifically, and completely respond to any request. They may move over, but while doing so are stiff in the bridle or in their bodies, and they never really soften to any pressure point. This is an example of a horse not doing one thing right.

        My solution to this is to pick the easiest maneuver that the horse hasn’t mastered and this will be my starting point. I will pick something that can be taught quickly because the object of this exercise is to be able to specifically reward the horse for completing a move so that I gain his trust, and his willingness to work for me. Once the horse knows what it feels like to make a decision and be rewarded for it several times, they gain confidence and are ready to move on to something else.

 When cues are taught in this consistent manner, with the trainer taking the time and freeing the horse up enough to make a choice, learning about how to do one thing at a time is complete. Horses that know how to do one thing right can be taught to do two things right, and so on. When you combine two or more complete responses together, you will develop moves and gaits that are distinct and easily repeatable, and most importantly, you will avoid the impasse of “information overload”!

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