This Study Group takes you through the second half of the Foundation Course and supports you as you continue to work with your horse using the CT techniques. You’ll teach your horse to send and hold on a target, stand on a mat or mark, train a soft back-up and learn how to put all the behaviours together to bring more flow, softness and communication to your training.

It covers:

Week 1
This week we’ll look at teach send to and hold on the target. There are loads of benefits of teaching your horse to send to and hold on a target, from teaching your horse to be happy moving away from you to using hold on a target to build a ‘stay’. They can then be used for teaching horses to stand tied, manners around feedtime and gateways, use around the stable and for loading and travelling.
Of course, the more your horse learns in this way, the better he will become at problem-solving, so teaching something new will help build those learning skills and keep you moving on fast enough to keep your horse’s brain engaged!

Week 2
The next behaviour we’ll teach is standing on a mat, board or ‘mark’. Standing on a Mark (also known as ‘stationing’ or ‘foot targeting’) is teaching your horse to stand on a mat, board or low pedestal. This is a great exercise to further improve your horse’s problem-solving abilities and your training skills. However, it also teaches your horse body awareness as he becomes much more aware of his feet and what he’s standing on, it builds horses’ confidence to step onto new surfaces such as into puddles or onto a horsebox ramp and it can be used to improve your horse’s ‘stay’, standing tied, hoof lifting, freejumping and loads more.

Week 3
This week’s behaviour is training a soft back-up. Teaching your horse to back up easily is such a useful behaviour for so many situations such as leading, loading and daily handling. This video shows you how to teach your horse to back up from a hand on a chest, and then to transfer it to a voice cue. The second video shows you how you can use the target to teach a back up instead, and also how you can use the target to refine and improve the way your horse backs up.

Week 4
In this final week, we’ll look linking the behaviours together, building duration and bringing more flow and two-way conversation to your training with your horse.