Help With My Horse is proud to offer this article about the 3 rules of horse training. These rules have always been a guide to help me with my training and horsemanship. Riding according to these rules keeps me structured and has always been important to me and my horse\’s journey keeping it progressing forward and continually improving. It applies to everything I do with my horse, every training technique, drill, exercise and every pleasure ride. I did not start riding horses as a child like many people did. I did not start to ride until I was in my teens. I was about 15 and there was this girl that I was dating every time we talked about some place to go on a date, she wanted to go horseback riding at some local stables that we had. So in order to go on the date I had to learn how to ride a horse. In the beginning I was basically just hanging on. Later we ended up getting married and starting a family and eventually she said that she wanted a horse. We did not have a lot of money so we found a young Appaloosa that was green-broke and that was our first family horse. Being that it was young it did not know much and when I rode I wanted to do what I could to make the horse better. I watched videos, at the time there was no YouTube, so I rented videos, and bought videos and tried to take what I saw in the videos and apply it to the horse. I always felt like I was getting into a fight with the horse. Everyone was telling me “always end on a good note”, but I was such a beginner rider I didn\’t even know what a good note was. I was getting stuck on the mechanics of what they said to do in the videos I was watching, and was not progressing with my horsemanship skills Then one day I had an older horseman that taught me a lot of what I know about horses, and still use today, tell me there are three rules to horseback riding. He said #1 is you as a rider do not get hurt, rule #2 is that the horse does not get hurt, and rule #3 is that one of you must learn something. When I started thinking about that I realized that even though I was trying to teach the horse these things that I learned in videos the horse was teaching me way more. It was me that was really learning. This is when my horsemanship really started to progress. I started paying attention to the horse because I didn\’t want to miss something that the horse was trying to teach me. Those rules really changed my way of learning as a horseman. It really taught me to pay attention to my horse and when I started paying attention to my horse and realized that I was learning just as much from that horse as what I was trying to teach the horse everything started falling into place.
This is Apache. This picture was taken later after he was pretty well trained and my daughter was showing him in pony club. 
Now this did not mean that everything was peachy keen and roses. Both me and my horse still had a long way to go, for me to get where I needed to go and for my horse to really get where he really needed to go. When you\’re working through the process of training you have a lot of decisions to make like what are we going to work on next, what are we going to do, what drills do I need to work on. I had to put an order to everything that we were working on for both me and my horse so I had a lot of decisions to make. Sometimes we would try things one day and it would work out and sometimes it would not. At the time I was such a beginner I didn\’t even know what I didn\’t know so I did not know that there was an order that things needed to be taught. I would see something taught in the video and try to teach it without even realizing that there was a prerequisite part that I was missing that needed to be taught before. So we still had struggles that were not all perfect. Training is a process, you have to learn step one before you can learn step two and so on. As I was working through this process I had to make a lot of decisions as far as what I was going to work on and how I was going to work on it and the order that I was going to work on things. The things that I was seeing in the videos were starting to make a little bit of sense to me, not a lot but a little, and I was needing to make decisions on how this progression was going to be with me and my horse. Some of those decisions that I made worked out, and some of those decisions did not work out. But the thing about it is when I made a decision and we tried something and it did not work I was able to learn from my mistakes and move on to try something else. One of the things that I never struggled with was making a decision and trying something. If you get stuck to a point where you\’re afraid to make any decision you\’re going to get stuck in your progression with your horsemanship and really kind of everything in life in general I think. If you make a decision and it turns out to not be a good decision, that\’s just a learning experience and you can learn from that and progress and move on and make a different decision next time. If you are afraid to make a decision and you don\’t ever try anything then there\’s nothing that it\’s going to be learned and you end up just stagnant, and that\’s stagnant in your horse experience or stagnant in whatever area that you\’re afraid to make a decision and try something. So I was never afraid to make a decision to try something for the day and because of that we did keep progressing. Two steps forward, one step back is pretty much how it went most days. Some days it was two steps forward and two steps back but because I learned from those mistakes we kept progressing. Don’t be afraid to make a decision and learn from your mistakes. This video talked about the 3 rules and also talks about the importance of learning from your decisions. https://youtu.be/-iox9Vsaczs The times when our horsemanship feels really bad are the times when we make our biggest improvements. We offer these blogs for free to help you with your horse needs. If you find them helpful we would appreciate it if you would share it on your social media. Also using these affiliate links for your online shopping helps to support the blog financially at no cost to you. Thank you. Amazon: https://amzn.to/3FQQjfJ Tractor Supply: https://www.gopjn.com/t/TUJGRU1GSEJHRU1FS0dCRkhMRUxM Horse.com: https://www.gopjn.com/t/TUJGRUVJTEJHRU1FS0dCRkZNR0lK
This is Apache. This picture was taken later after he was pretty well trained and my daughter was showing him in pony club. 
Now this did not mean that everything was peachy keen and roses. Both me and my horse still had a long way to go, for me to get where I needed to go and for my horse to really get where he really needed to go. When you\’re working through the process of training you have a lot of decisions to make like what are we going to work on next, what are we going to do, what drills do I need to work on. I had to put an order to everything that we were working on for both me and my horse so I had a lot of decisions to make. Sometimes we would try things one day and it would work out and sometimes it would not. At the time I was such a beginner I didn\’t even know what I didn\’t know so I did not know that there was an order that things needed to be taught. I would see something taught in the video and try to teach it without even realizing that there was a prerequisite part that I was missing that needed to be taught before. So we still had struggles that were not all perfect. Training is a process, you have to learn step one before you can learn step two and so on. As I was working through this process I had to make a lot of decisions as far as what I was going to work on and how I was going to work on it and the order that I was going to work on things. The things that I was seeing in the videos were starting to make a little bit of sense to me, not a lot but a little, and I was needing to make decisions on how this progression was going to be with me and my horse. Some of those decisions that I made worked out, and some of those decisions did not work out. But the thing about it is when I made a decision and we tried something and it did not work I was able to learn from my mistakes and move on to try something else. One of the things that I never struggled with was making a decision and trying something. If you get stuck to a point where you\’re afraid to make any decision you\’re going to get stuck in your progression with your horsemanship and really kind of everything in life in general I think. If you make a decision and it turns out to not be a good decision, that\’s just a learning experience and you can learn from that and progress and move on and make a different decision next time. If you are afraid to make a decision and you don\’t ever try anything then there\’s nothing that it\’s going to be learned and you end up just stagnant, and that\’s stagnant in your horse experience or stagnant in whatever area that you\’re afraid to make a decision and try something. So I was never afraid to make a decision to try something for the day and because of that we did keep progressing. Two steps forward, one step back is pretty much how it went most days. Some days it was two steps forward and two steps back but because I learned from those mistakes we kept progressing. Don’t be afraid to make a decision and learn from your mistakes. This video talked about the 3 rules and also talks about the importance of learning from your decisions. https://youtu.be/-iox9Vsaczs The times when our horsemanship feels really bad are the times when we make our biggest improvements. We offer these blogs for free to help you with your horse needs. If you find them helpful we would appreciate it if you would share it on your social media. Also using these affiliate links for your online shopping helps to support the blog financially at no cost to you. Thank you. Amazon: https://amzn.to/3FQQjfJ Tractor Supply: https://www.gopjn.com/t/TUJGRU1GSEJHRU1FS0dCRkhMRUxM Horse.com: https://www.gopjn.com/t/TUJGRUVJTEJHRU1FS0dCRkZNR0lK