Training Tip: Battle Burnout By Trying Something New

Just like us, horses can get burnt out and develop bad attitudes. In some cases, burnout can come from pure boredom. Imagine if when you were in school, your teacher never got past teaching you the alphabet. Every day, she’d drill on the same lesson. It wouldn’t take long before you’d be bored to tears, and you’d probably resent even seeing her. The same theory applies to your horse. If your horse has the Fundamentals Roundpenning Exercises down, get him out of the roundpen and introduce new exercises to him. Don’t nag him to death.

If your horse is developing a sour attitude, be sure you’re introducing new exercises, mixing things up and giving him a purpose for doing the exercises. That’s why I built the obstacle course at the ranch—it allows me to fine-tune the groundwork exercises without boring the horses to death. Now, just because the horse understands a particular exercise, it doesn’t mean you won’t ever come back to the exercise. You’ll certainly still practice it, but maybe only twice a week, and you can keep it fresh by incorporating obstacles.

The need to avoid burnout with Mindy and Diez, my two horses that helped me teach the Method and went out on the road with me at the start of my career, is the reason why I started learning tricks and liberty training. I needed to keep both horses in shape mentally and physically, but I knew that if I kept drilling on the same old Method exercises, they’d want to completely check out. So I taught them a new skill set. Even though the Method exercises provided the foundation to be able to do liberty work and even some of the tricks, challenging the horses by asking them to do new things kept them interested and engaged with me.

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