90 DAYS OF PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

By Gary Hubbell

“90 days professional training,” reads the classified ad. Every time we see a horse listed for sale with those words, Doris and I get a laugh. We’ve learned to be skeptical about what kind of training a horse has had. Early in my horse career, my mother brought a young gelding to a woman down the road for training. After a month, she hadn’t saddled the colt and she sure hadn’t ridden him. She just kept running him around in a round pen, round and round, “ground breaking” the colt. Of course, she was about 80 pounds overweight and didn’t look athletic at all.

After a couple months of this nonsense, I found a trainer who was gentle and calm, but also had spent a decade riding broncs on the rodeo circuit. As we interviewed him to see if he was the trainer we wanted to hire, I asked him how long he spent ground-breaking colts. In a slow drawl, he answered, “Well, between five and ten…” and I thought he was going to say “days,” but he said, “minutes.”

Both approaches have their value. Ground training is certainly valuable, as my wife has taught me from her extensive study of Clinton Anderson’s techniques. But so is riding the horse and exposing the horse to a variety of situations.

As we become more and more urbanized and parcels get chopped into smaller and smaller pieces, it’s harder to find trainers who have easy access to the best training tool of all: the mountains. If you think about a horse trainer’s day, you have to know what they’re up against. There are chores to do, stalls to clean, phone calls to answer, and meetings with clients to schedule. If a trainer has an assistant, that takes a lot of the burden off, but by the time a trainer takes a horse from his stall, grooms him, tacks him up, and answers a phone call or two, he doesn’t have time to put your horse in a trailer and take him to the mountains. Your horse will be lucky to get 30 minutes a day of riding in a sand arena, and that’s only 5 or 6 days a week. If your trainer actively shows horses, he’ll be gone two or three days every weekend, and your horse might get less than that.

I have encountered more than a few horses that supposedly had “90 days of professional training,” and I couldn’t tell that they had been trained AT ALL. In my opinion, those trainers should have been prosecuted for fraud! I have done a limited amount of training for the general public, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to train your horse. Let the other guys and gals do it. Doris and I like to train our horses on our schedule, as we see fit, and we don’t want a bunch of people around slowing us down. If we want to let a horse stand in the field for two weeks, that’s our decision, and we don’t want to feel guilty about not giving somebody their money’s worth. However, any horse we’ve had for 90 days has damn sure got a foundation under him, and if you’re any kind of a rider, you’re going to enjoy riding him. You sure won’t be standing there trying to put a halter on him—with no success—and wondering who in the hell cashed three $600 checks and told the owner they’d trained the horse for 90 days.

horse training colt finds that it isn't as easy as it looks sometimes
No matter what, horse training can be difficult and we respect anyone who "straps it on". This colt was telling the trainer that he was a little too rough with his hands.

In 90 days, if we’re actively putting time into the horse, we should be able to put a great foundation on a horse that will allow the horse to be successful the rest of his days. Let’s say we’re starting with an older three-year-old colt, in the late summer and autumn before he turns four.

Many horses aren’t ready for hard riding when they’re two and even three years old. They look like gangly 16-year-old boys—skinny legs, chests not filled in, knee joints not set, a bunch of ribs and hips. Once the knee joints have closed and there’s no danger of grinding up their joints, we like to put them into a program, realizing that they’re going to be weak and their attention spans will be short.

GROUND BREAKING

(3 days-2 weeks) We start with a program of ground breaking so that the colt knows his place in the social strata of the “herd”. The goal is to “join up” the young horse and allow him to follow your lead. In other words, we, the trainers, are the lead horse, and we’ll let him come in to work with us. Many modern trainers use variations of this ground training method, such as John Lyons, Monty Roberts, Clinton Anderson, and Buck Brannaman. Doris teaches the young horse to respect her presence on the ground, and to flex his neck and touch his side, so that he’ll be easier to move when we’re in the saddle. In particular, this follows the Clinton Anderson method. How long should it take for ground training? With the Clinton Anderson method, you spend more time on the ground than most other trainers, but the results show up quicker when you’re riding the horse. Give it three days at the minimum and two weeks at the maximum, an average of an hour a day. There are volumes and volumes of material on ground training, and we could endlessly debate whose methods are better and how to do it, but I’m just telling you what works for us.

RIDING IN THE ROUND PEN

There’s no better proof of the progress you’ve made with a colt than when you first saddle him up and put your foot in the stirrup. There are dozens of decisions that a trainer must make prior to this very important step, and the colt will quickly show you whether he has accepted your training or not. A couple of times, I was positive that I’d gotten through to a colt and had properly done my ground training, only to have the colt blow up and throw me a mile high. Obviously I hadn’t done enough! Luckily I landed flat on my back in a soft arena, and wasn’t hurt, but jeez, the potential was there to get really hurt. Once I saddle a horse and climb on and ride him in the round pen, my first goal is just to get him comfortable with me on his back, let him know that he doesn’t have to buck (and really shouldn’t even think of it), and maybe take a few steps. If I can steer him a little bit and get him to go in a circle a few times, great. The main thing is to get him used to someone on his back. I also like to mount and dismount from both sides several times to get him used to a rider on either side. I make the first session short—about 15-20 minutes of riding at the most. The second and third sessions are repeats of the first session, but adding a little direct reining and making the sessions a little longer. By the third or fourth session, I’m usually feeling comfortable enough to introduce a little trotting.

RIDING OUTSIDE THE ROUND PEN

Many trainers like to ride their colts in the round pen or arena for many rides on end, and then take them to the mountain. Our horses are used to living in a large, open pasture with ditches, trees, gullies, rocks, and fences. We like to take a colt right out and ride him in the open. Really, he’s already been trained to do this—it’s where he lives night and day. He knows the pasture better than we do. We're just taking him from the kitchen to the living room. We like to ride the colts in an easy gait right across the river, through the sagebrush, up the mountainside and back down. I’ve done this with several colts, and usually it was ride #6, 7, or 8. No kidding. You might think I’m lying, but it’s true.

PACKING

When it’s time to go up the mountain, using a young colt for a packhorse is a great way to teach them the job as a trail horse. Take your time saddling him with the packsaddle, and make sure he doesn’t spook over the panniers or britching. Keep the load really light—heck, even a couple of saddle blankets wadded up is a big enough load—and make sure it’s not fragile or valuable. The colt will bang his load off trees and make mistakes, but that’s how we learn! I make sure the session is successful. I don’t load the colt down with a heavy, bulky load, and I don’t ask too much. An hour or two on a trail ride is plenty. I like to stop and take a break and maybe have a bite of lunch at the midway point. If I feel the colt is nice and tired and his head is in the right place, I might switch saddles on my riding horse and ride the colt home. That will really punch the lesson through. When he gets back to the pasture, he’ll be tired and have nothing on his mind but a good roll in the grass and filling his belly. How many times do I pack a colt? Plenty. Plenty, plenty. Maybe 20 or 30 times. You’ve got to play on the junior varsity before you become the star football player.

RIDING

So…90 days of professional training, huh? I don’t promise to ride a colt every day. In fact, after I put the first 15-20 days on him, I might let him stand around three or four days in a row before I work him again. But when I DO ride him, I might put a longer ride on him—three or four hours, or maybe even a seven-hour ride on him. I guarantee you, that seven hours on a tough, rocky trail, packing a camp into the mountains or maybe chasing cattle, is worth fives times as much as a five days of 30-minute rides in a sand arena—a week’s worth with any given trainer.
The colt learns to find his heart and his wind, and muscle up to the situation. He learns that it’s damned hard work, and he doesn’t have any energy to waste on throwing fits or doing stupid stuff. It’s much easier just to worry about carefully placing the next step and the next and the next and giving it his all. That’s what makes a good horse.

WALKING, TROTTING, AND CANTERING

We usually trot a colt within the first handful of rides. They like to move, they like to feel their freedom, and that first whisper of working together with a good rider calls to them. We usually canter a horse within the first seven or eight rides. Why wait? Oh. I see. You’re afraid. You’re not athletic. You can’t afford to get bucked off. Then why call yourself a horse trainer? We don’t! I don’t even call myself a horse trainer, and yet I’m out there cantering a colt after six rides. So who in the hell is cashing checks, calling themselves horse trainers, and don’t even bring a horse to a canter in 90 days? Honestly, they’re out there. Our colts know the transition from walk to trot to canter and back down within 15 days, and pretty fluid in 30 days. By 90 days, we’re really comfortable with it, doing lead changes and learning to sidepass. We like to take a colt into an arena for this aspect of his education, and just get nice and comfortable with making the transitions from gait to gait, just loping along and letting the horse stretch out.

LONGER RIDES

After you’ve got the basics into a colt—walking, trotting, cantering, some neck reining, 20 or 30 days of packing, some good 2-3 hour rides—it’s time to put the pedal to the metal. Ride that colt. Tire him out. Exhaust him. Reach deep into the tank and see what he’s got. When that colt is near the end of the 90 days, he should be able to turn on a cow and cut her off and send her the right way. He should have the stamina for a long day in the high country. He should stand stock still while you groom him and tack him up. He should jump right in the trailer. He should be fun to ride, and ready to take to the next level—whether reining, cutting, team roping, ranch roping, or just being a fun trail or pleasure horse. That’s what we expect in 90 days. Is that what you’ve seen or experienced? I bet not.