09/08/2018
I want to talk a little about the importance and the value of going slow in the training.
I see a lot of people (including many professional trainers) that approach a lesson with haste. They want something done and they want it done NOW. To get it done quickly becomes part of their agenda and itās always hard to change an agenda.
One example of this I see all the time is a person wanting to have a horse circle around them on a lunge line. They often point in the direction they want the horse to go and then half a second later apply a lot of pressure to drive the horse out on the circle. The horse is given no time to process the meaning of the finger pointing or that there is a request for him to move his feet or how fast, what gait, how big a circle etc. The only lesson learned by the horse is to āget outa hereā.
With repetition, the cue to circle becomes a reaction to flee the pressure with no understanding of why or how. It is almost a reflex. There is no opportunity for the horse to participate in the conversation or feel comfortable with the relationship. It is a master/slave scenario.
People often approach training this way without realizing the problem.
I was watching a video on how to use the settings on my new camera to adjust white balance. The expert spoke so fast and flipped through the settings at such lightning speed that I had no hope of understanding the process. I could slow the video down and mimic the expertās actions, but I was still left perplexed about why and how to adjust white balance shift for different lighting conditions. Then I found a video by a woman who explained the colour temperature under different lighting conditions and how I could adjust the white balance to accommodate those conditions. She spoke slowly and covered every step without leaving any gaps in the knowledge I needed. We have 4 different cameras in our home and I feel confident I now understand how to adjust the colour to the correct balance in most lighting situations no matter which camera I pick up.
Going slow added to my clarity of understanding the principles of why I needed to take into account the white balance and how to adjust it. If I had just followed the first video I would need to memorize the menu pages and the setting numbers ā and heaven forbid I find myself with a different camera or unusual lighting. But the second video broke the information down enough and was slow enough that instead of rote learning the procedure I understand the process. Furthermore, I liked the way the woman in the second video taught and have been watching more of her videos. Conversely, I have not watched any other videos from the bloke in the first video.
Why donāt we think horses need that same courtesy of understanding that we need ourselves?
The other part of going slow that I feel people need to appreciate is that we need to keep going slow until the lesson is consolidated. Many people think that if a horse has executed a task a few times well, itās time to add hurry to the exercise ā get it done faster. But asking a horse to do something faster and still be emotionally comfortable requires an absolute and complete okay-ness with doing it slowly. Speed adds worry, so if a horse is already carrying a little worry when performing slowly, then the worry will be significantly magnified when asked to perform more quickly.
You can see this everywhere. How many horses can perform a really nice turn on the haunches a step at a time, but become rigidly tight and stiff when it is turned into a reining spin? What about horses that can walk okay, but take off running when asked to trot or canter? Then there is the horse that within a very short time of learning to leap a 30cm jump from a trot we are asking for it to clear a 1m jump at a canter.
The hurry inevitably adds to the horseās adrenaline level and raises the excitement and anxiety leading to a break down in communication between horse and trainer. It is so important that we donāt ask a horse to speed up the way he performs until he is absolutely calm and confident with performing the job slowly. And even then adding more speed to the task should only be done incrementally and no further hurry should be asked for until the horse is okay at going only slightly faster.
Step by step and layer by layer is always a good rule. The slower you teach the faster your horse learns.
Photo: The picture is not meant to depict anything in particular, I just liked it and it made me laugh. āDid I ride like that when I was a kid learning to jump?ā
