Guiding Starbuck: lateral flexion

Showing posts with label lateral flexion. Show all posts

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Videos

So here are the videos from yesterday's photo session, it was the first time I ever longed or led her with the line attached to the bit. So the first is standard longeing, first with the line hooked to the rope halter and then with the line attached right to the bit. The second is working a little on lateral flexion and just getting her used to giving her head to the right and the left when she feels pressure from the reins.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Key Concepts: Release = Reward

When I first started thinking about working with Starbuck, there was one thing which I kept wondering. How can I get her to do what I want her to do? And what's more, how to make sure that she always does it when prompted by a hopefully invisible cue? As with pretty much everything in this world there are different methods and different opinions, from brute force or tiedowns and habit (like this little guy above) to using treats or a clicker for positive reinforcement. However the trainers whose methods most appeal to me (John Lyons, Monty Roberts, Elizabeth de Corbigny, Ron Meredith, Clinton Anderson or Pat Parelli to name a few) have found that negative reinforcement seems to be the method that horses find most logical and easy to follow. In this post I'll try to condense some of their ideas in a way which seems to me to be simple to understand.

Although the phrase "negative reinforcement" sounds like punishment whereas "positive reinforcement" is the giving of rewards, nothing could be further from the truth. Wikipedia defines negative reinforcement means "the taking away of an aversive stimulus to increase certain behavior or response" and as a matter of fact the above mentioned trainers counsel against ever punishing a horse unless they're being agressive towards you. In the case of horse training, the aversive stimulus is pressure, for example from a rein or your leg if you're riding or from a rope, your hand or a crop if you're on the ground. So what you do is set up a situation where the pressure you create is logical to the horse and as soon as they even so much as try to do what you want them to do, release. Then you repeat until the pressure becomes a cue that the horse will respond to every time you give it. Once a cue is truly learned and the horse is never permitted to ignore it, the horse should respond in any situation no matter how stressful or unusual.

A good example is what I'm currently teaching Starbuck, which is to yield her hindquarters (turn her back legs in a circle while keeping her front feet in more or less one place-- this is an important building block skill for the one-rein stop as well as lateral movement). So what I'm doing is first flexing her head toward me slightly and then putting pressure on her side with the back of my hand (more or less where the foot is in this image):

At first I use extremely light pressure then increase by stages (Pat Parelli calls these phases "Fly, Mosquito, Blackbird and Eagle") until I'm using a slightly annoying pressure that she can't ignore for very long. As soon as I get the result I want, I immediately remove the pressure by taking my hand away. The first times we tried this, I released as soon as she even shifted her weight away from the pressure so she would know she was on the right track. After she got consistent at taking one step with light pressure I started asking for more steps before releasing and now we're up to about half a circle. Eventually I'll work up to a full circle, then will start working on asking her front legs to lift and lower in the same place and finally will try to do this in more and more strange or stressful surroundings.

The most important thing is to apply pressure gradually but release immediately, that way the horse not only learns to do what you ask but to do so with the lightest pressure (cues) possible. As a matter of fact, after she's done well for about 10 - 15 minutes I reward her in the same way by removing any psychological pressure and letting her take a little break. And the best thing about it is that it's a method which can be applied in any situation whatsoever: for instance if I'm trying to use a fly spray and she's jumping around I maintain the fly spray near her until she calms down and stands still, then take it away, thus "rewarding" her for standing still by "releasing" the fly spray.

So can the negative be positive? In the case of negative reinforcement, I would say yes! Of course, positive reinforcement ("pats on the back") is important too and something I use constantly, but generally after she's figured out how to find her release :D

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Today

Today Starbuck had a really good day! I was surprised because it was really windy and she seemed a bit tetchy when I took her out of her paddock but after a couple of bunny hops she smoothed right out and did great. We longed for about 20 minutes with the saddle on and the stirrups down, then we played a little porcupine game, walked and trotted in-hand, and worked on lateral flexion. After that, we took a long walk around the stable yard with the saddle on, working on stopping when I stop, not getting ahead of me and backing up when I jiggle the lead line.

Seeing how calm she was, I took her over to the mounting block (actually a sawed off tree trunk) and stood up there with her next to me and just petted her and talked to her until she was used to my new height. In the end I also leaned over the saddle a little, putting part of my weight on her, and also put my foot in the stirrup and "scratched" her girth and side with my boot toe. My friends were trying to convince me to get on already but I think I'm still not ready, at any rate next week I'm going out of town for four days and when I get on her for the first time I want to ride her a little bit every day for at least a week.

All in all it was a great day and I'm really pleased with how things are going!

BTW thanks again to Salva for the amazing photos!!! :D

Saturday, September 10, 2011

One Rein Stop

With so much talk about flexing the neck (which is something we practice most days), some of you may wonder what the benefits of this are. One of course is keeping Starbuck supple and flexible, another is so that she practices giving in without resistance to pressure on her face (at the moment with the halter but eventually with the bit). However there is a technique which is one of the first I'll be teaching her from the saddle which is called the One Rein Stop (or Emergency Brake) which effectively disengages the hindquarters (this is just fancy horseman jargon for crossing one back leg over the other and thus moving sideways), thus putting the horse in a position where they no longer have the power to keep moving forward in a straight line.

At any rate I think it's a useful technique to teach any horse, since anyone who's had a horse buck, rear or run away with them on top or even just get a little out of control at the canter will agree that an "Off" button would have been really appreciated at that moment. So here's a video explaining how to teach your horse the One Rein Stop and then another with some practical examples which I hope you'll find interesting:

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

To Flex or Not To Flex

So after thinking a little more about the video I posted the yesterday and wondering a little about training Starbuck to flex laterally at the neck, I realized that I didn't exactly have an expressible reason for wanting to work on this. I guess since yoga, pilates and other flexibility exercises make me feel better and have less muscle aches after working out it just seemed like a no-brainer to me that the same would be good for horses. I also felt like it would be a good way to work on submission, being able to handle her head and getting her ready for work with the bit.

So I started reading a fair amount about flexing online and saw that there’s a little bit of a polemic as to whether flexion is safe, necessary and / or natural for a horse, especially regarding vertical flexion (lateral flexion is bending the neck to the right or left, vertical flexion is bending the neck downwards). There’s even a practice called Rollkur once used by Olympic dressage riders but which is now banned by the International Federation for Equestrian Sports which basically refers to the use of force (vía harsh bits, double reins and similar mechanisms) to cause a horse to overflex vertically, like in this photo:

I’ve ridden horses who had previously suffered this type of systematic abuse and know that it takes a long time to rehabilitate them to where they are free from pain and at all comfortable being ridden and would definitely never want to cause this type of problem for Starbuck! To soothe my worries, I found lots of articles and videos which praise lateral flexion techniques as helping horses to stay supple, including from the US Equestrian Team’s horse masseuse (see below). But what most set my mind at ease were photos like these which show horses doing the exact same kind of movement in the wild when completely relaxed. So I'm determined to keep working on lateral flexion from the ground and also when I start riding (for example with the one rein stop). Enjoy the photos!