I explained that the purpose of the groundwork was to better prepare a horse to be ridden. Everything we do should be connected to developing a better riding horse.
The horse world is awash with training methods for every aspect of dealing with horses from handling foals to competing at the highest levels in any given sport.
A horse’s mind needs to become the other half of an alive and active conversation. When training, there is no point in lunging a horse if their feet and body are doing the work but their minds are on vacation.
We only have so much conscious focus our brains can commit to. If you are doing a single task you could argue that it has 100% of your attention. But nobody does a single task and nobody commits 100%.
If you can do that you avoid the pitfalls of your horse just learning a job. Instead, they learn to work with you and trust your ideas with every step. If you only teach a horse to do jobs you are only teaching tricks and they will fail you when the circumstances change.
