Fast Track – Smooth hands produce a soft response in your horse

I can’t figure out any other way to say this to make a big enough impact on everyone – bumping or jerking our horse around on the end of a lead rope for any reason other than an emergency is simply not acceptable – and even then I’d be reflecting afterwards to thinking how I could have had smooth hands within the emergency.

Rough hands – jerking no matter how inadvertently – are the cause of all kinds of problems with horses including horses who don’t want to get caught, uncooperative horses, resistance in the bridle, horses who come “behind the bit”, bracing and defensiveness that gets in the way of our horse even being able to feel what we want and a host of other problems.

Did you hear that? 🙂 Read that last paragraph again, because I guarantee that some of you will have this as a root cause behind everything from “don’t want to get caught”  to float loading problems, to ridden problems.  That’s a live being on the end of our rope and reins, of amazing sensitivity and generosity and capacity for love – and this smooth hands stuff is one of the ways we pay tribute to that.

The trouble is that very few of us were taught how to have smooth hands that were a pleasure for our horse to follow. Luckily, this Lesson is going to start changing that!

For our horse to be able to give us a soft response in our ridden work, we need to be offering a soft feel all the time, even on the ground and this is one of a bunch of technical lessons about how to have a good feel with your horse.

Watch on youtube if you need to.

Keys to Success

1.  Now, do you think Val could have got such beautiful feel so fast if she had been doing this Lesson with Topacio on the other end of the lead? I don’t think so!  It’s doing this with a HUMAN that is the key to FAST TRACKING this success.

2.  You can re-program your reactions to smooth hands on auto pilot and work out how to get your movements in your Comfort Zone and learn more easily when you do simulations like this.

3.  Good posture standing and walking has a big positive impact on our ability to have smooth hands for our horse. The effortless stability of this good posture makes a smooth contact with our horse’s head much easier.

4.  Try it for yourself in your own simulations, practicing smooth hands with someone else, or tying your halter to a door knob, going very slowly and feeling for yourself what happens when your horse hits a loop in the lead rope will bring home the importance of this smooth hands stuff in dissolving resistances and defensive posture in your horse.  You may wish to review some of your earlier lessons on good posture:

– For the beginning of good posture

– For the introduction to walking your way to brilliant riding – being able to have that springy posture in movement will give you “spongey feeling” hands that will give you softness in your hands when you take the loop out of the rope.  There’s some fabulous lesson / simulations of that spongey feel, in the live seminar archives section on your student forum.  Feel for the other person or the door knob with smooth hands with an arched back and locked knees and then drop into good posture and feel the difference.  It’s chalk and cheese.  That’s an Aussie expression for “It’s VERY different!”
– Where you get to practice that walking in good posture – practicing the feel of that springy posture as you’re walking when you’re not with your horse is worth it’s weight in gold.

5.  Add to that the combination of the Inner Awareness (or getting a Quiet Mind if you can’t find that easily) and the slow slide to the STRAIGHT line between your hand and your “horse’s” head is what gives the clarity of the communication – firm, clear communication with no jerk for your horse to have to brace against.

Written Version of the Video

It’s pretty hard to do a written version of a video – but here goes…!

As you change over from liberty to a halter and lead rope – what do you want to happen? You want to feel safe and have your horse feel safe. You specially don’t want to throw THAT baby out with the bath water as you go from liberty to a halter and lead rope! You want to keep the bond that you are developing at liberty. And you want to continue to listen to your horse and to have your horse listen to you.

Since most of you will need to have a halter and lead rope on your horse before we finish our liberty lessons – here’s a little challenge. What about spending your next horse day figuring out what, if anything, bothers your horse about being in the halter and lead rope.  Listen to every little Not Quite Right, stop breathe for Quiet Mind on it, get any insights necessary, take any action necessary to get rid of it. And some of you might be waiting for a chew for a while as your horse processes old trauma.

Because I am telling you that an awful lot of horses have been “settling” on this issue (“settling” is an Aussie expression for putting up with it), some of them are downright scared and most of them have something about the halter and lead rope that they are not happy with – and whatever THAT is, it’s getting in the road of your happiness with your horse.

So here is just ONE of those things that can bother a horse about the halter and lead rope – how we use it. That’s a bit of a “duh!” statement hey?

Smooth hands – they are such an important aspect of your communication with your horse. I have heard it said that you can’t teach “feel” that you either have it or you don’t. What a load of crap! If you want the kind of feel that great horse people have – then you can have it – it just takes no pressure, in your Comfort Zone practise. Smooth, slow hands are one of the keys.

So, take your horse and their anxiety out of the equation and practise this with another person who will REALLY tell you if there is the slightest bump in their hands as you practise together. If you simply cannot talk anyone else into doing this with you, then tie your rope onto a firm object and practise with that.

Then we went into video footage of Val with a slow sliding of her hand with a straight line on the rope between her hand and the “horse’s head (me) and getting a nice feel on the rope.

The next clip showed the sudden jerk that happens (generally because we are trying to be gentle) when there is even a small loop in the rope before you ask your horse to do something.

Then we showed Val combining the inner awareness that you get from the Quiet Mind exercise AND the slow sliding of her hand down to a straight line on the rope – to get the feel of a world class horsewoman.

The next clip was me demonstrating how to lift your other hand up towards your ear, as you slide to shorten your rope – it’s a method to give you more reach if your rope is a little long.

Then we showed how to hold the excess of rope in your arm without looping it around your hand and risking getting your fingers chopped off if anything goes wrong.

And finally we went back to the footage of Val using her inner awareness AND the slow sliding of her hands to FEEL so beautifully when she had a firm and clear connection with her “horse” who in this case was me – a connection that was the basis for ANY communication with her horse.

Up Next

You next lesson is another one that will have a big effect on your riding. I know you did those two haltering exercises in your foundation principles – but haltering was a life altering event for most horses and the tension and resistance is still bubbling away in there. 

The next lesson is about establishing an actual Comfort Zone for your horse around them being haltered and releasing any old resistance, nerves or anxiety around this very important daily event. And since resistance and anxiety add to each other, this release work is much more important to many more horses than we would think.