2010 Mark Rashid Clinic - Horse #3 - Dial It Down, Slow It Down

If you haven't already, please read the "Common Themes" post, which also references the post covering common themes from last year - these posts will give you a good idea of the framework and thinking with which Mark Rashid conducts his clinics, and will help you understand what I'm talking about here.

Although every horse/rider pair made significant progress during the clinic, this 6 year old chestnut QH mare and her rider were one of the pairs that came the farthest, and it was largely due to the rider's willingness to learn and make changes in the way he interacted with his horse. I also particularly liked this mare, as she reminded me a lot of Dawn, not in appearance but in her intelligence and worries. This rider and the rider of horse #5 were husband and wife, and they raise and show cutting horses. He hadn't ridden this mare a lot, and she'd only been ridden 100 times or so since being started. He'd been working on rollbacks and spins, and both he and the horse were getting pretty frustrated. The horse was very nervous and fretful, and the rider was tense when they first started working on day one. As the rider tried to ask her to do a rollback, the mare was pinning her ears and looking pretty agitated and unhappy. After she took a few steps, she would often leap sideways for part of the turn.

Mark said it looked like she'd gotten stuck at one point in the turn - not quite sure what to do with her feet - and then rushed through the rest of it. She had stopped thinking and was just trying to get ahead of the pressure. She needs to learn that she doesn't have to rush. When she was standing still, she was able to stand quietly, so the problem with the rushing related to the work. Mark said she was tense and troubled and frankly somewhat scared. At one point she was calling for her buddy - Mark said she wanted to go back to be with her buddy because she felt her buddy knew more about her than the rider or Mark did - she just wanted out of there. Every time the rider started to work with her on the maneuver, her fear would come back up and she would try to rush - it turned out later that the couple had fired a trainer who had been rough with their horses, and some of the mare's behavior may have arisen due to this.

Mark told the rider that he needed to dial down his movements and aids, and to slow everything way down, and just make everything he did much softer - the mare was very sensitive and responsive and was being pushed and rushed and ended up over-amped - there was no way she'd be able to do a movement fast if she didn't understand how to do it slowly. He should work on each movement one step at a time, giving her the space and time to figure out what to do with her feet. He said often people give their aids off a brace, or intensify an aid when they don't get an immediate response, and that bracing and pushing can block the horse's movement and lock it up - the horse can get the job done but it makes the horse's job much harder. He said many cutting and reining riders are taught to cue off a brace, and although many good horses manage to do their jobs anyway, they'd be much more able to do it, and do it better, if the riders were softer. The message was break the task down and turn down the volume - the rider took it well.

The horse needed to feel better about the work, and to do that she needed time to think about where to put her feet. This was another case in point where horses are taught to do a performance task - taught the answer to 2+2 is 4 but never taught to add - never given the space and time to think about a task and understand how it should be done. The rider's job is to listen to the horse and not pressure or rush the horse through the task. Once she feels in her body how to do it correctly, she'll be much calmer about the work, and then they'll be able to work on speed.

Mark did a lot of work with this rider on the feel he was carrying in his reins - Mark does this by taking one end of each rein in his hands and having the rider hold the other ends. He had the rider play both the horse and the rider to get how things should feel from both ends. Mark wanted this rider to be softer in his use of the reins - the length of the rein doesn't matter, the feel does - the objective is to stay connected while using much less pressure. When the rider was able to do this, the mare's mouth quieted down. The feel when contact is taken up should be that of blending - staying connected and providing resistance/pressure as needed but not pulling even if the horse does - this is a hard concept to convey unless you feel it in your hands. If you are pulling against the horse's pull and the horse softens, your hands will recoil and the horse doesn't get a release. If you're blending, and the horse softens, your hands stay put and the horse gets a release. Your hand should set a soft boundary, not a rigid wall.

Here they are on day two - the horse is still somewhat worried, but you can see that she's thinking about things. The rider is also working hard on maintaining that soft feel they'd been working on during day one:

Day two was largely spent doing lots of transitions, particularly downwards transitions. The rider said he'd never done any downwards transitions other than lope to stop and trot to stop - their trainer doesn't like them doing anything else for fear it'll mess up the horse's stops. Mark said he thought there was a way they could still work on downwards transitions from lope to trot and trot to walk, since the cues for those would be different than the cues the trainer was having them use for stop. And this transition work would help both horse and rider learn to be softer, and that would also benefit the stop. This is a good example of how Mark works with riders from different disciplines - he helps them build on what they already know to work more effectively in their chosen discipline.

As they were working on their transitions, the horse wasn't entirely sure what the rider wanted, so she struggled a bit. Mark said as she was learning, rather than telling her what to do, do it together with the rider leading the horse. Being a good horseman or woman involves making adjustments depending on the horse, the day and the situation - this horse needed him to dial things down, and then dial them down even further, and to not be in a rush with the horse, giving her time to do the transitions and figure things out. Mark didn't want the rider to try to shape or refine the behaviors he was asking for until he was sure that the horse understood what he was asking for and could do it. (This was an interesting contrast with horse #4, where the challenge was not to leave the horse guessing but provide more immediate direction to sharpen things up.) Mark had him throw in some stops so the horse could distinguish clearly between the two different behaviors - and the stops were much softer, but still very clean.

One thing the rider did while they were working on the turn on the haunches was to slightly change his rein position on her neck - he raised it slightly and that seemed to make a big difference to the mare. By doing this, he broke the pattern of the way he was interacting with the mare. As Mark pointed out, any pattern that is established between horse and rider will be either a good thing (if it's a pattern of interaction and resulting behavior that we want) or a bad thing - the trick if it's a bad thing is to figure out what we've been doing and change the pattern and try something different until you find something that works better.

On day three, the pair came out looking much better - the rider was much softer and the horse was much happier and not worried. The less the rider pushed on or interfered with the horse, the better she was able to do what he asked. The downwards transitions were much cleaner - the rider said "I only have to have a twinge of thought and she does it." The mare could execute a turn on the haunches correctly without rushing, and they could work on more speed once they got home.

Mark talked some about the most effective way to work - it's important to give the horse a break once you've got a couple successful repetitions - if you keep repeating at that point without taking a break the horse may think it's not giving you what you want and start offering up other things that you don't want and then you've lost the thread and have to start all over. In each work session, Mark recommends working intensively in a number of short repetitions on one thing, and then doing something completely different, and then coming back to the first set of work, and then perhaps doing yet another thing, with each piece of work done in short intense sets. Don't work continuously on one thing for a long time - the horse needs mental breaks to think about it and will often come back doing it better than before. Mark also said that he had changed the format of his clinics from four days to three because the fourth day often turned into a review session and he didn't think the riders were getting their money's worth on the fourth day. He said that three days of intense work by horse and rider was about the right time frame for things to come together. Mark likes, for horses and riders, and riders working separately on their own physical fitness, a 3 days on, one day off or 5 days on, two days off schedule. Sometimes those breaks allow things to really improve.

One thing Mark always asks each rider as they get to the end of the clinic is whether there is anything they didn't get to do that they wanted to do. This rider said he had wanted to work on lead changes, but said (admirably in my opinion) that they weren't quite ready for that yet. Mark also had noticed that the mare had a tendency when she stopped to tip her head slightly to the left and to want to bring her hindquarters to the right - this could indicate a problem in the right hindquarters, possibly her right hip area, particularly as she had a harder time with the left lead canter and with turning to the right - she might need some chiropractic work. He also recommended that her teeth be looked at - if the horse's jaw cannot move properly to both sides, that will often interfere with downwards transitions or cause crookedness. He also said - and my personal experience strongly agrees - that most vets and many horse dentists work on horses' teeth improperly, not paying sufficient attention to side to side motion, the way the TMJs work, and the effect the incisors have on the whole mouth - the incisors often need dental work they don't get. Problems in the mouth affect the entire horse and way of going, not just the mouth and head.

By the end of day three, things were looking really nice - the horse's expression is much happier and the rider looks more relaxed and soft, and happier, too, and notice that he's no longer got a death grip on the reins and his position is more balanced:

I really thought this pair had come a long way, and both of them deserved a lot of credit. Mark said this mare had a lot of integrity - she wasn't going to stand for being pushed around or overcued - this certainly reminded me of Dawn!