The “RELAX” portion of an exercise serves a very important purpose.
A huge amount of training involves overcoming anxiety. Entering and exiting natural states of arousal is critical to building a horse’s ability to understand and tolerate unexpected events.
Horses have a threshold (tolerance to stress) for anxiety-inducing events. They can sometimes build up anxiety over multiple events, never fully letting down, but seeming to function. They enter a state of anxiety, seem to be tolerating it, then unexpectedly explode later when their stress “runs over”. Or they build up the stress and then shut down completely. Your job is to know his stress level and provide the opportunity to relax and de-stress before he is pushed beyond his limit.
Adding two-way communication into your training session allows him to show you his anxiety and allows you to retreat before over doing it. In the face of a scary object or situation, watch his reaction, and let him know that you understand his concern by not pushing through to panic or flight. Pay attention to his signals. Back off before trespassing over the threshold. Slow down, and respect his feelings about the situation. Give him time to think. Then give him time to relax. He needs time for “Recovery”. During his recovery (which can be as short as a few seconds to several minutes), he comes out of his anxiety state to think about what just happened and “digest” the process. It also allows him time to note your body cues for clues to YOUR attitude about the event while his nervous system recovers its equilibrium.
During recovery, a horse who has previously faced a situation with his head high and body tense will lower his head and begin to lick and chew (even yawn) as he relaxes his head, neck, and jaw muscles that were tight during the stressful event. It is the same as when a human opens his mouth and manipulates his jaw and neck after being “uptight” for a period of time.
Manageable stress (low level anxiety) is important here. Asking him to move, circle, change positions, or even look at an object in the round pen is certainly manageable if he has been introduced without pushing past his limits. The more times a horse experiences manageable stress and is allowed to adequately recover, the more Resilience he develops. It is an incremental process that enlarges his threshold and builds his confidence. It requires Relaxation.
The process can be derailed by poor training techniques: Not allowing a horse to relax between segments of an exercise, exposing him to too much stress without escape, flooding him with repeated stresses that build without proper nervous system decompression. These are all signs of a clueless trainer who cannot read the horse’s anxiety level and adjust accordingly.
Learn more about how to de-sensitize a horse to scary situations here
Horse training can be dangerous. Not all methods work on all horses. Instruction presented here is not meant to be prescriptive in nature, and Horse-Pros.com takes no responsibility for the welfare of any animal or person using our methods.
Please note that any advice given on horse-pros.com is neither veterinary nor prescriptive in nature but offered only as an introduction to this topic.
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I am so very happy to have found this website. I love how clear and simple your teaching is and that you teach it step by step. I plan in sharing it to a horse forum I belong to. I feel the more people that understand proper training, the more horses will be taken care of and not discarded or treated cruelly. This type of work will actually save horses and make humans safer. The fact that you make it accessible is a gift. Thank you .
Hi Kerri: Thank you so much for your kind words and for sharing the site. Too many people are in a hurry to train their horse without proper understanding of a horse’s mind. Very few people want to read the “Theory” portions of horse-pros.com They want to get right out there with a rope and a stick and get started. My formal training is in psychology. But it doesn’t take a psychologist to know that the “why” is as important as the “how” and “when”. Maybe you can encourage more people to start at the very beginning with Theory before they jump into Exercises. It will shorten their learning curve, save a lot of miscues, and make working through unexpected problems much more intuitive. Luckily horses are more tolerant and resilient during poor training technique than you might think, but why make them go through it if the answer is to be found before the exercise starts?