Trainers cont’d: Tik Maynard

We were introduced to Tik Maynard’s expertise by our trainer, Cayla Stone, another mustang/OTTB/can train any type of horse kind of trainer. She said to watch his videos and read his book, In the Middle are the Horseman. So we did both. Lisa and I very much enjoyed his book, and we get A LOT out of his videos. It was my desire to see more of Tik’s training method that moved me to join Noelle Floyd+. His philosophy of taking a step back in your horse’s training to increase a horse’s confidence really makes a lot of sense, and seems so humane. We met Tik at the Lucinda Green clinic that we were fortunate enough to audit, and he was very welcoming and congenial. He informed us that he didn’t have lesson horses but could give us a ground work lesson, and we jumped at the chance. We were added to his WhatsApp lesson list so we could schedule, and this made us feel very privileged and lucky. We are country mice, so it doesn’t take much. Tik and his wife, Sinead, have a beautiful place called Copperline Farm out of which they run Copperline Equestrian. It was only 10 minutes from our AirBnb.

Our lesson with Tik Maynard was a ground lesson in the round pen and was super useful for the specific exercises he gave but also for working on our own body language. We were told to pretend to play tag with our horse to develop he proper energy to communicate with him. He also said you can be soft but you need to be clear, and not to confuse softness for a weak signal. He also told us to practice hitting a barrel with a stick and then immediately relaxing. He demonstrated this with one of the horses, “you can give a super clear and fairly dramatic signal and then if you immediately relax the horse also relaxes.” He commented that this is how herd life works, and so just because you feel all angsty about making a clear signal, if you relax immediately the horse is not going to care. They do not particular feel any lingering emotional effects of a correction like some more sensitive humans might (note to self). We did a few exercises. We sent them to a barrel from outside a 10M circle (we were not allowed to go into the circle). We moved them laterally with their heads pointing toward the round pen, learning to move their shoulders or the hips, whichever end was out of line. One of the most important parts of the exercise was the release part, which is leaning on the fence. Our second exercise was to back the horse in between two barrels from wherever they were. I learned so much about moving their hips versus blocking with my hand to move their head, and how much pressure to apply to move them just a little bit. The cutest part of this exercise was that the horses found treats on top of the barrel when they finally made it to standing in between them. We longed them over a small jump, changing directions to jump it both directions. Naturally I urged my horse on too much (excessive clucking, according to Tik), and made him go to hard. Another thing I learned was that if the horse balks at the jump, don’t make him jump over. Let him stand and sniff, then turn him and try it the other way. Patience!