Hi,
As we have seen in the last email, Malou’s turns would have benefitted from a “magnetised” mat that pulls her forward after the tight turn.
An excellent lesson to get this “tractor-beam effect” is Alexandra Kurland’s “Runway lesson” to teach her foundation lesson “Standing on a mat”.
In a nutshell, you set out a V with cones and place the mat at the narrow end. You go around the V “casually” and, as you approach the entrance to the wide end, you click to stop your horse. In the V shape, you use your rope handling skills to ask your horse to take one step forward or one step backwards. This will develop joy stick-level control of each leg, which is useful to get onto mat.
As this level of control is tiring, you release your horse forward to the mat, where you click and reinforce. At the beginning, horses are typically reluctant to put their feet on the mat. As you progress with this lesson, you’ll get a horse that pulls you to the mat (tractor-beam effect). When that’s the case, you use the fine-motor control inside the V to teach the horse patience until you let her go to the mat. At some point, you horse may not want to leave the mat, so stepping off the mat is reinforced by re-entering the V at the wide end. It is a very complete lesson.
If you want more detail about this lesson (and many more), I refer you to Alex Kurlands treasure trove of teaching materials.
Malou already knew the mat and I did not specifically teach this lesson. So let’s look at Baby Graya going through this lesson. (You’re lucky I found this clip on one of my old hard drives.)
In email #6, I mentioned that initially, I couldn’t use the Runway lesson with Blondie. As we progressed (carefully) with the use of the lead rope, I revisited the lesson. Also this clip is from early training, before she moved to our place. But it’s already a lot calmer than before.
On first impression, the “Runway lesson” seems to be primarily about the mat, but the interesting stuff happens in the preparation before the release to the mat. This fine motor control is addictive.
Here is a later clip of Blondie where I integrate the “joystick” in the cone circle. My goal with Blondie was to shape more “contact“. So instead of releasing immediately, I actually stayed a little longer in contact. Sometimes, I want to ask for more than one thing through the lead rope, e.g., give, forward AND sideways, and to communicate this, I need contact.
Initially, contact was threatening to Blondie, but building it up in small steps with many releases, got us there.
For riding, I use the same principle of building contact using Alexandra Kurland’s Single Rein Riding. We’ll get to that later but I wanted to point out the connection.
The Runway lesson results in a “magnetised” mat that can be used for so many things, e.g., parking but also forward. Mats can also act as directional cues, sending your horse to a specific place.
I love using multiple mats. I was creative once and made this little set.
My current set of 30+ mats is made of carpet squares that I found in my parent’s attic. Not as pretty but easy to carry.
For example, I threw them out of my car window and had them ready for a trail ride with Graya when she wasn’t confident about leaving the barn without her buddies. (Giulia still laughs about this.)
I used mats to teach Asfaloth a path to follow and then faded them out. This resulted in a wonderful liberty game that he clearly enjoyed.
Spending time on the foundation lesson “Standing on a mat” is time well spent. Describing the many applications of mats can fill books. There are millions of examples and I am sure you have your own story when mats became extremely useful. Share your story with me, I’d love to hear it.
Have fun with mats,
Michaela