How to Help your Horse find Relaxation

In this video Angie explains two components to this exercise, one for the horse and the other for the human and then it’s about bringing them together so you are both interacting in a calm and relaxed state.
The first is to help support YOUR HORSE to come back into a more relaxed state through movement.
The second is to help YOU to come back into your body through awareness.
Your horse may be over activated, anxious and busy in their mind (and body). When this happens with horses, most people get over activated too and start to feel really anxious, I refer to this as coming ‘up’. The horse becomes even more anxious because their human is becoming really anxious so the horse starts to get extremely anxious, so then their human feels like they are completely losing control of the situation and by then the horse doesn’t feel supported at all and is out of control in their emotional (and sometimes physical state).
However, when you have strategies in place you can learn over time how to come ‘down’, so you can then help support your horse to find relaxation. When your horse’s nervous system is activated and they are in mild to extreme hyper arousal it’s important to uses strategies to help support them to find a better place and slowly move more towards relaxation. Though to be able to do this you have to learn how to regulate your emotional state. Whatever is happening in your body in regards to your emotional state, your level of anxiety and tension, your breathing and your muscle tension has profound impact on your horse’s emotional state.
What is co-regulation in relationships?
“The concept of co-regulation, also called mutual regulation or social affect regulation, can be defined as the way in which one person’s autonomic nervous system sensitively interacts with another person’s autonomic nervous system in a way that facilitates greater emotional balance and physical health”.
Co-regulation happens in horse-human relationships all the time often without people being aware of it. In the video I talk about different strategies to help both the horse and the human to find more calm and relaxed states.
In this video I show people two different exercises that you can do ‘Leading for Relaxation’ and also ‘Lunging for Relaxation’ to help discharge some of your horses nervous energy. I then stress the important of then stopping and supporting and offering your horse to come into a more relaxed state.
You will see how I start with Leading for Relaxation, for when your horse may be a little anxious and need to drift and move their feet because they are not ready yet to stand and come into relaxation. However, if your horse is really activated and they are getting worse with leading then I would suggest moving onto Lunging for Relaxation. In the video I talk my way through how I lunge a horse when encouraging them to find more relaxation.
I also suggest that sometimes you have to support your horse with an assertive leadership approach for short periods by interrupting the negative pattern or behaviour and then supporting and offering relaxation.
There will also be some days that your horse will be in a really regulated emotional state but you aren’t because you may have had a really stressful day, so then you can use the techniques in this video to help yourself come back into your body so both you and your horse can find more connection, calm and relaxation together.
I hope you enjoy this video, you can watch the FULL training session here:
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