VBR Equestrian Education

28/08/2026

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08/05/2026

HORSES DO NOT LEARN BETTER OR NEED TO BE PUSHED OVERTHRESHOLD TO LEARN ☺️

In fact research shows that OPPOSITE.

And this applies across ALL good training.

Regardless of method, discipline, or philosophy, learning is most effective when the horse is able to stay regulated, process information, and respond without entering survival mode.

Once a horse is pushed over threshold, the brain prioritizes survival, not skill development.

My brain is cooked so here is a repost of my infographic from 2021:

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Let’s Talk About Thresholds

The more you understand your horse’s thresholds, the better you can keep them comfortable, safe, and ready to learn. Working with horses is as much about reading their emotional state as it is about teaching skills. This awareness is key to preventing stress from escalating and turning into dangerous behaviour.

If you look at the chart above, you can see how quickly stress levels spike when the yellow zone signs are missed. I break thresholds into three simple colour zones.

🟢 Green Zone:

The horse feels safe and relaxed, showing no signs of fear or anxiety. This is the best zone for learning. Memory, focus, and problem-solving are all functioning at their highest. Training here builds trust, speeds progress, and reduces the need for retraining later.

🟡 Yellow Zone:

Subtle signs of stress, fear, or anxiety appear. This is the caution zone. Without intervention, stress levels can escalate into the red zone quickly. The goal here is to de-escalate and bring the horse back to green.

🔴 Red Zone:

The sympathetic nervous system takes over and the horse enters flight, fight, or freeze mode.

Flight: Primary defence, bolting, often with no regard for safety.

Fight: Secondary defence, kicking, striking, rearing, or turning the hindquarters toward the threat.

Freeze: Immobility with a rigid neck, raised head, fixed gaze, slowed heart rate, and sometimes explosive reactions when coming out of it.

❓Why the red zone is so dangerous:

When a horse crosses into this zone, their body floods with stress chemicals such as adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol, all of which have been widely documented in equine stress research.

These chemicals prepare the body for survival, not learning, and they create a chain reaction in the brain and body that impacts both safety and training:

• The prefrontal cortex (responsible for decision-making, focus, and memory) is impaired.

• Memory formation and recall drop sharply.

• The horse’s reactions become faster, less thoughtful, and far more unpredictable.

• Human safety risk skyrockets, handling a horse in this state greatly increases the chance of injury to both horse and handler.

The skill every horse person must have:

• Read stress signals before they become obvious.

• Recognise calming signals and displacement behaviours.

• Understand equine body language well enough to measure thresholds in real time.

This takes careful observation, practice, and education. If you are unsure whether you could confidently recognise these zones in your own horse, that is your starting point. The more you practice, the more natural it becomes and the safer, calmer, and more effective your work will be.

06/05/2026

A French study published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science (April 2026), by Jardat, Cognie, Avargues-Weber, Reigner, Calandreau and Lansade investigated whether horses can recognise and match human facial and vocal expressions of fear and joy simultaneously.

Using the Equine Facial Action Coding System (EquiFACS) alongside behavioural and heart rate measures, 33 Welsh mares at a research facility in Nouzilly, France were presented with two simultaneous silent videos showing a human face expressing joy on one side and fear on the other, while a voice expressing either fear or joy was played through a central speaker.

Contrary to what might be expected, rider-equivalent factors such as the emotional content of the voice alone did not drive consistent differences in looking time — instead, it was the match between face and voice that shaped the horses' responses.

The authors suggest that horses' natural preference for looking at joyful faces masked the expected looking-time response to emotional mismatches.

However, cross-modal recognition still showed up through ear movements. Horses made more ear movements when looking at a face whose emotion was incongruent with the voice they heard demonstrating genuine cross-modal recognition of both fear and joy.

The most interesting variations in behaviour occurred not between voice conditions, but in how horses responded to the emotional content of the faces themselves.

Horses looked longer at joyful faces than fearful ones across all conditions and immediately upon viewing fearful faces, horses showed more frequent half-blinks. This suggests a subtle emotional reaction to human fear that does not always reach the level of full physiological stress.

The post-exposure pattern of emotional reactivity is particularly interesting for welfare and equestrian practice, as it suggests horses actively process, categorise and respond to human expressions in cognitively complex ways.

This study highlights the value of understanding not just how horses behave during work, but how the emotional state of the human handler shapes that experience from the horse's perspective.

🔗 Read the full paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159126001139

30/04/2026

Why riders with poor support in the saddle suffer back pain

Pelvic Tilt & Lumbar Spine Biomechanics – The Hip–Spine Connection

This image illustrates the fundamental biomechanical relationship between the pelvis and lumbar spine, often referred to as the hip–spine rhythm, where pelvic orientation directly dictates lumbar curvature, load distribution, and muscle activation patterns. In anterior pelvic tilt, the pelvis rotates forward, which drives the lumbar spine into extension, increasing lumbar lordosis. This position shifts the line of force posteriorly, resulting in greater compression on the facet joints while reducing anterior disc pressure. The hip flexors, particularly iliopsoas and re**us femoris, remain in a shortened and dominant state, while the hip extensors and abdominal muscles are relatively lengthened and inhibited, creating an imbalance that reinforces excessive lordosis and reduces core stability.

In contrast, posterior pelvic tilt involves backward rotation of the pelvis, which pulls the lumbar spine into flexion, flattening or reversing the natural lordotic curve. This shifts the mechanical load anteriorly onto the intervertebral discs, increasing anterior disc compression and posterior annular tension. The abdominal muscles become more dominant in this position, actively pulling the pelvis posteriorly, while hip extensors contribute to the tilt. Although this may reduce facet joint compression, it significantly increases intradiscal pressure, particularly in sustained positions such as prolonged sitting, making the lumbar discs more vulnerable to degeneration and posterior disc bulging over time.

At the intervertebral level, lumbar extension promotes posterior approximation of vertebrae, narrowing the intervertebral foramen and potentially affecting nerve root space, while directing the nucleus pulposus anteriorly. In lumbar flexion, the opposite occurs: the vertebral bodies separate posteriorly, the nucleus pulposus shifts backward, and tensile stress increases on posterior ligamentous structures such as the supraspinous and interspinous ligaments. This repeated posterior migration of the disc material under flexion loading is a key biomechanical factor in disc herniation, especially when combined with compressive forces.

The interaction between hip and spine becomes even more critical during functional movements like sitting, bending, and lifting. When hip mobility is restricted, the lumbar spine compensates by increasing motion, leading to excessive flexion or extension loads. Efficient movement requires proper load sharing, where the hips absorb and generate motion while the spine maintains controlled stability. When this balance is lost, either through tight hip flexors, weak glutes, or poor core control, the lumbar spine becomes the primary site of stress concentration.
Ultimately, this image highlights that pelvic tilt is not just a positional change but a biomechanical driver of spinal loading patterns, influencing muscle activation, joint stress, and disc behavior. Maintaining a neutral pelvis allows optimal force distribution, minimizes excessive compressive or shear forces, and preserves the natural shock-absorbing capacity of the lumbar spine, making it essential for both performance and injury prevention.

24/04/2026

Find your hidden weakness and focus 🙂