Variety is Important When Training Your Horse

For the past 20 years, Clinton Anderson from Downunder Horsemanship has devoted his life to creating the best training tools and videos available to help train your horse, regardless of their problem. He believes that it’s training the owners that poses a real issue. Join him as he tackles some of the most challenging situations with problem horses and with problem owners. This week, we go learn why variety is so important when training your horse.

Clinton begins the episode by reminding everyone that consistency is your greatest ally. Regardless of the situation you’re in with your horse, the best thing you can do is to be consistent and keep up with your training. Inconsistency is your greatest enemy and can easily thwart even your most intensive efforts. However, consistency doesn’t mean that you need to keep your routine the same. Variety is the spice of life and helps keep things fun and exciting. Repeating the same exact routine or training just gets boring. Clinton says that if you begin to get bored with the routine, imagine how your horse feels. Eventually, they’re going to get disinterested and even resentful.

Imagine keeping your children in the same grade at school forever. Eventually, they’re going to hate it and the entire routine that surrounds it. That’s why children progress through different grades in school, each one focusing on building upon their previous knowledge using unique methods. But, if you move a kid from grade one to two too quickly, he gets confused. The same mentality applies with horses.

You have to have enough variety in your training exercises and interactions with your horses to keep them mentally engaged. Horses are motivated animals, but they need to be both mentally and physically stimulated. Clinton tells us that even though his horse Diez is extremely well trained, he doesn’t work with him every single day now. He knows everything, so continuing to push intensive training on him would only cause issues. Instead, whenever he decides to work with him, he sticks to fun, interesting drills. Think of how you’d feel doing the same exact job for years on end. While there are plenty of ways to spice up your routine, if you aren’t careful, you can easily get bored and start to hate what you do.

With horses, the way to keep variety in your training methods is to always start with the fundamentals and do everything you can to ensure that they master the techniques. Then you move on to intermediate training, then advanced. Moving through the Method will keep your horse engaged and help them learn along the way. Variety keeps it interesting. That’s why Clinton loves using obstacles during his trainings. Doing so gives your horse a purpose and keeps things fresh so you can engage and develop a healthy partnership.

The Downunder Horsemanship Method is the key to getting the most out of your partnership with your horse and we want everybody to experience the difference it will make. That’s why we created three ways for you to get the training content you need at the price you want. Our basic level allows you to purchase and download training content to your device at our standard price with no annual fee. When you become a No Worries Club member for $19.99 a month, you get up to a 50% discount on any of your purchases. You’ll also get eight digital videos and four digital journals a year and access to the No Worries Club website, the largest collection of Clinton Anderson method material and resources in the world. If you want the ultimate experience, the premium membership is for you. You get all the benefits of the No Worries Club, a printed copy of our No Worries Club quarterly journal, and access to all the Clinton Anderson method and the professional series kit training videos. Altogether, that’s thousands of dollars of horse training and 20 years of horsemanship delivered right to your fingertips.

Start your digital training experience today. Visit our homepage and download the Downunder Horsemanship app to experience the Clinton Anderson method in a whole new way.