Horse Groundwork

By David McMahon

Whether your horse is green or the best horse in the world, groundwork is an essential part of horse training-especially with natural horsemanship. The reasons are simple. A horse has survival instincts that can make horse handling downright dangerous. If feeling threatened, a horse may kick or try to flee. If a horse is running scared he might get in blackout mode and you might get knocked down or run over if you happen to be in his way. If you're in the saddle out on the trail, your horse could run you into a tree or worse. A woman who knew my mom several years back got run into a tree by her horse and was killed instantly. So its important for us to train our horses to be calm, relaxed, and responsive. We do this with groundwork.

But that isn't the whole story. Suppose your horse is calm and relaxed. Are you aware of the way your horse is sizing you up and seeing what he can get away with? We call this bad horse behavior but what this is really about is setting up leadership and respect. If your horse doesn't respect you then she is going to be exhibiting bad behavior-crowding you, walking all over you, or being "stubborn" and refusing to do what you ask. A horse that is stubborn can be just as dangerous as one that's flighty. Turns out the same groundwork exercises we can use to train a flighty horse also work with one that's stubborn. In fact they are an essential ingredient of horse training with any horse-even one that's well behaved.

In horse training, groundwork is the essential first step in building a solid foundation with your horse. Groundwork teaches a horse good manners, sets boundaries that make horse handling safe, and builds trust, respect, and leadership between you and your horse. If you want your horse to be your best griend, groundwork is where you need to start.

In his new 60 minute video, Mastering Basic Groundwork, Eric Bravo works with two green horses and demonstrates several key groundwork exercises you can start using with your own horses. He begins the video with a round-pen session. Many people lunge their horse to get out excess energy, but Eric does it to get inside the mind of the horse and in an insightful demonstration he shows how to use the round-pen to bond with your horse.

Establish some boundaries
Next he works on several exercises to teach the horse to be light and responsive and to respect spatial boundaries. This is a very important aspect of horse ownership because of safety. All too often I see people letting their horses nibble at their pockets or come right in so their nose is in your face. People think its cute, but its actually dangerous. I've had my own experience with this-one night I was out walking my horse Goose and I took a break to pet him. I was a bit too close. He lowered his head to the ground and then came up quickly-and his nose clocked me right in the jaw! Horse's are big animals so I was in a lot of pain and was seeing stars! And this was the result of no bad intentions on the part of Goose. I came out OK, but I could have been seriously injured. This shows how important it is to put space between you and your horse. You choose when to go in and pet him, its not up to the horse because its a safety issue.

Get and Keep the Attention of Your Horse
After covering basic leading, Eric demonstrates how to move and position the horse on the ground. These exercises benefit you and your horse in several ways. First, it helps establish your leadership which is important on several levels. You don't want your horse thinking for himself on the trail-that is how my moms friend ended up being run into a tree. You want your horse to look to you for leadership and guidance. These exercises help you build this kind of relationship while on the ground, where its much safer. What you do with these exercises will carry over directly to riding.

Also, it helps build a communications channel between you and your horse. You will get so in tune with him that riding will become easy and light. In one groundbreaking technique Eric Bravo calls "Magic Eyes", Eric shows you a three-step exercise that will get and keep the attention of your horse. This also carries over to riding-do you want your horse to be looking off in the distance for threats real or imagined-or do you want him trusting your guidance? Magic Eyes is one of the best groundwork horse training exercises you can use to build a solid relationship with your horse.

In two very interesting sections of the video, Eric teaches you how to divide a horse up into three "zones" that can be used to ask the horse to move in different ways. Then he introduces an exercise called "one-step forward, one-step back" that gives you more precise control over your horse than you thought was possible.

Speaking From Experience
I have to admit that my pre-Eric Bravo horsemanship was embarrassingly lacking. I've learned more and accomplished more with my horses by applying the groundwork exercises in this video than I ever dreamed was possible. Something I really like about the video is that there is a clip where Eric shows a student handling her horse, so you can see where she needs to work on her handling of horses, see Eric offer corrections, and then apply that to your own horse training. The training techniques presented in this video are simple to understand and use and can be used with any style of riding-Western or English. It costs just $34.95 and I have to say as one horse person to another that I highly recommend this video.

Visit http://nmhorse.com/Mastering-Groundwork.html for more information.