Training Tip: Adding Speed When Backing Your Horse Up

Question: How would you get a horse to back up instantly with a little pressure? My horse backs up so slowly and won’t back up unless I give a lot of pressure or use a whip to guide him.

Answer: It sounds like it’s time to enter the Do It Now Stage of training. When you introduce an exercise to a horse, you start with the Teaching Stage. In the Teaching Stage, your first order of business is to teach the horse the concept lesson.

In the concept lesson, your goal is to get the general idea of the lesson across to the horse. For example, if you’re teaching your horse how to back up, you would first want him to understand that when you create pressure in front of his nose, he needs to respond to it by moving his feet backwards. As soon as he takes a step back, you’ll instantly reward him by releasing the pressure so that he knows he did the right thing.

Once he’s got the concept lesson down, then you can work on improving his understanding of the exercise. Each time you work with the horse, you’ll look for a little more improvement. The first day, he may have only taken a step or two backwards. On day two, you’re looking for him to take two or four steps backwards. Each training session, you’ll gradually build on the lesson until the horse is confident doing it. At that point, you’re ready to enter the Do It Now Stage.

Let’s say you’re working on Backing Up Method 1: Tap the Air. By this stage in his training, your horse clearly understands the lesson – when you tap the air in front of his nose, he should back away from you and continue backing away from you until you release the pressure. To enter the Do It Now Stage of training, you’ll cue the horse, and then, if he doesn’t immediately start backing with energy in his feet, you’ll go straight to high pressure – whacking the lead rope clip with the stick.

Because he understands the lesson, you’re no longer going to progressively build through the stages of pressure. Now when you cue him, you want a Yes, Ma’am response. If he doesn’t immediately start backing with energy, you go straight to high intensity. You’re no longer in what I call the cutesy-cutesy stage.

It’s just as important to release the pressure at the right time. Horses learn from the release of pressure, not pressure itself. So whatever your horse is doing when you release pressure is what you’re rewarding. That means if your horse is backing slowly and you stop applying pressure, that’s what you’re rewarding. You’re telling him that backing slowly is the answer.

Don’t take any of what I’m saying out of context, meaning if you’ve just started teaching your horse to back up and he’s struggling, the answer isn’t to go straight to high pressure. If your horse doesn’t understand the concept of the lesson, it’s not fair to him to go to the Do It Now Stage. The exercises in the Method are taught the way that they are to help the horse best understand what you’re asking of him. If your horse has no clue what you’re asking him to do when you tap the stick in front of his nose, immediately whacking the clip with the stick isn’t fair to him. You have to give him a chance to respond.

In this particular exercise, you tap the air. If he doesn’t respond, then you tap the rope. If he ignores you, you whack the rope. If he still ignores you, you hit the clip. And if he still doesn’t respond, you whack his nose.

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