Ever had the privilege of watching a natural born horse person in total harmony with his pony do nonchalant tricks with it that you wouldn’t have imagined possible and cause them to look so ludicrously straightforward? And ever tried out the same tricks with your own pony and made a total hash of it? You must have been pretty frustrated.

If you did anything like that, you were guilty, as so many people have been, of forgetting that what looks like perfect harmony is the results of hard training repeated time and again until perfection was reached. We human beings are frequently guilty of needing too much too quickly without having to go through the due process. In the case of horses and their achievements, we forget that every accomplishment is the sum total of lots of tiny steps that have practically become 2nd nature as the result of repeated practice. When we suddenly try out something new to our horses, we’re going to puzzle the wits out of them and achieve nothing except total frustration for both.

Just look at easy scenarios involve horse coaching. Take an example when you are training your horse to back up between two parallel poles laid out on the ground. It may appear to be the simplest of tasks to you, but your horse will not agree. You might think that all you’ve got to do is get him aligned and moving, but he’s not going to be comfortable with the idea of moving through 2 poles of which only one is visible to each eye. This tends to distract the horse, and they will not even allow themselves to be aligned between the poles. If they are somehow aligned, they’ll try to work out what has happened by moving their rear ends to one direction. And if you come up with a way to get over that problem then the horse will keep barging into one pole or the other, rather than backing up in a straight line.

Unless you are knowledgeable on pony psychology, you will get frustrated. If you do know horses, you may appreciate that horses need to get comfortable with any new action before they can be made to do it. In this example, your pony needs to get used to a pole on each side. You can facilitate the process by breaking it up into tiny bite-size chunks and handling them one at a time.

First, get your pony to walk forward between the 2 poles a few times, so that he becomes used to seeing them there and to seeing one pole with each eye. Once he goes through like a shot, ramp up the coaching one notch. Get him to stop at random points while progressing between the poles. Get your pony to repeat this until it becomes second nature for him. Eventually, get him to take a single step backward. Let him take that step and ruminate on it. The stop after just one step is his reward for doing what you wanted him to. Take him through one or two one step forward and one back cycles at various points between the 2 poles. Then take him back thru more than one step, even with his body out of alignment with the poles. Once he is completely used to the idea of going forward and back a couple of steps (keep increasing the distance), you can walk him forward from one end of the poles to the other, and then get him to back right up. He may start dodgy, but he is going to pick up and soon he will be progressing thru the poles either way like he had been doing it all his life. Remember the old Chinese saying about a journey of a thousand miles starting with one easy step, it is especially applicable for horses.

You can begin by teaching your pony while you are on the ground, then when that stage has been successfully mastered; you take it to a higher level by getting your pony to do it while you are astride him. Start slow and simple and soon enough you’ll find that your pony is setting the pace, a faster one.

Horses are Heather Tomspassion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers http://horsehorses.net/