5 Benefits of Teaching Your Horse to Stand on a Mat

When you start clicker training your horse you might want to start with something fun and measurable. Key Lesson Mat training is an excellent exercise to start clicker training your horse. It’s a very simple exercise to train and easy to understand for your horse.

What does Key Lesson Mat training look like?

Your horse steps with his 2 front hooves on a mat. Soon you can train for duration and teach your horse to stay on the mat.

Purpose of Key Lesson Mat training

• Safety: It creates distance between horse and handler. If he is standing on a mat he is not in your personal circle
• Practising sending your horse away from you, towards the mat
• Practising asking your horse to come to you, towards the mat
• Groundtying with feet
• Clarity: horse knows what to do, where to go and where to stand
• Great foundation: ideal stepping stone to train other behaviours

5 Benefits of teaching your horse Key Lesson Mat training

1. Horse pays attention to the mat, not your hands or your pockets
2. Horse learns he has to do something in order to receive a click and reinforcer (C&R). He also learns that he can influence the C&R with his own behaviour
3. Makes it way easier and quicker to teach your horse other useful behaviours
4. Teach your horse to move towards something, instead of moving away from something which is so common in other training methods
5. Mats can become ‘safety blankets’ because of their positive reinforcement history. If the horse spooks there is a huge chance that he will look for the mat to stand on to give him comfort.

In this video you can see what happens when Kyra spooks: she doesn’t run to me or run me over. Instead she runs to the mat for comfort and safety. Super powerful benefit, wouldn’t you say?

 

Advanced Mat training ideas

• Put 5 or 6 mats in a circle and teach your horse to go from mat to mat
• Exercise your horse without riding by sending him from mat to mat with a few poles or low jump in the middle
• Teach your horse to stand on other (unfamiliar) objects like tarps, pedestals, trailer ramps, wooden bridges, hoof jacks, into a bucket of water and so on.

 

 

 

 

 

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Preparing for a hoof stand.

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Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners create the relationship with their horse they really, really want.  I do this by connecting them with their inner wisdom and teach them the principles of learning and motivation, so they become confident and skilled to train their horse in a safe and effective way that is a lot of FUN for both human and horse. Win-win.

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Fun Friday: Easy Tricks & Tips for Fun

Get out of your normal routine and do something new and exciting with your horse this weekend. Here are some tips and tricks you can do.

One day tricks

If your horse is already clicker savvy and knows basic behaviours like leading, standing still, targeting, follow a target, mat training and backing it is very easy to teach one of these simple tricks.

Clicker trained horses are very eager to learn new things because in their experience there is a lot of good things (clicks and treats) involved. It is fun for your horse! Want to start clicker training? Start here.

Horse hug

Basic behaviours: standing still while handler stands next to shoulder and targeting.

Teach your horse to follow the target that you keep behind your back, click and reinforce for every inch his head moves in the right direction behind your head. Last step is to fade out the target. More detailed instructions can be found in this book Horse Trick Training

 

Standing on a pedestal

Most horses like to be a bit taller and think this is a fun exercise once they have learned it. Mat training is a good basic skill to start with.

Set your horse up for success and click and reinforce for every small step like approaching the pedestal, then investigating it and touching it with a hoof, et cetera. Raise your criteria slowly.

Before you know it your horse wants to stand on the pedestal. Therefor it is equally important to teach him to backup and dismount it. Don’t forget to reinforce that, too.

General tips

• Keep the sessions short (5 minutes) and repeat over the weekend.
• Give your horse a short break in between the sessions.
• Make pictures or a video on Sunday to record your success. Please share your pictures with me on Facebook.

More fun things to do

• Explore your surroundings and take your horse for a hand walk or hand grazing session. Read here how you can teach your horse to leave the grass voluntarily.
• Ask a friend to go with you. Do a photo session with your horse during the sunset.
• Hide a treat under a cone and teach your horse to find it.

Have fun with your horse! If you have fun tips & tricks to share, please write them in the comment section. I am looking forward to hearing about your fun time with your horse.

Sandra Poppema

Are you interested in online personal coaching, please visit my website or send me an email with your question to info@clickertraining.ca

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Fun exercises to start clicker training

Having fun is important because it keeps you and your horse motivated. If you start positive reinforcement training/clicker training you can be overwhelmed by ‘everything you have to do differently’. Not only do things in a different way, but also exactly in the opposite way.

If you come from a traditional background training and riding horses or you come from a natural horsemanship background, you can have the feeling that you’ve been doing it ‘wrong’ all along. That’s not true and it is also not a motivating thought.

People who change their approach because they are looking for a more ethical way of training or the method they use to train horses doesn’t feel good anymore, are often attracted by positive reinforcement (R+) methods. In R+ it’s common to give the animal a voice in training. Giving the animal power over what is happening to him builds trust.

Start easy, stay motivated
Set yourself up for success. A good way of starting positive reinforcement training with your horse is to start with easy, seemingly purposeless and completely new exercises to your horse that give a feeling of accomplishment when you reach it.

Start easy and choose something fun so you will stay motivated. Be gentle with yourself: you are learning a new skill. Give you and your horse time to learn and discover.

Choose an exercise that looks impressive but is simple to teach your horse and simple for your horse to learn. Don’t start with complex behaviours before you have enough basics under your belt.

Consider it ‘fun’ time
If the new exercises seem purposeless there is no stress if you decide not to follow up with training and there is no pressing timeline in your mind (like a farrier appointment that’s coming up for a scared or green horse).

Choose something completely new. In this way the horse doesn’t have an existing association with the new things he and you are going to learn. You start with a clean slate.

Trick training
If you want to practise your mechanical skills in clicker training and you are looking for suitable exercises to start with, think about starting trick training. There are several easy tricks you can teach your horse and practise your clicker skills, your timing and safe hand-feeding skills.

For a safe and fun way to start take a look at my Key Lessons (your Key to Success).

Easy and fun tricks to start with are:

• standing on a mat, a tarp or a pedestal with 2 front feet
• smiling (= flehmen)
• simple bow (front leg one step forward and head down)
• targeting (touching an object)
• shaking ‘No’
• push a ball with his nose
• back crunch

What exercises or tricks would you recommend to horse enthusiasts that just started clicker training?

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Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get the results in training they really, really want with joy and easy for both horse and human. I always aim for win-win!

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