The Importance of Flexible Training

At KJ stables Mikayla is continuously looking to further her training skills and finds that it is incredibly important to keep an open mind when looking into other training methods. Growing up Mikayla never had formal riding lessons, so the majority of her skills are self taught. She learned through watching videos of various trainers, taking advice from more experienced horsemen and women, and a lot of trial and error just to see what would work with each individual horse or mule that she worked with. Being open minded and flexible to various training methods has helped her training business grow because each client and each horse are going to be different and may need to be worked with differently. Winter of 2021 Mikayla was feeling a bit stuck with the training methods she used while working under another trainer, while she learned tons of valuable skills she felt that she needed to go in a different direction to further grow. Timeline wise was during the same time Mikayla adopted her first mustang through the NC TIP Challenge, she lovingly named him River. This was her first time ever gentling an unhandled horse, while he was a soft eye and kind hearted horse in the beginning he did not respond well to the traditional training Mikayla was used to which gave her the opportunity to try out training with positive reinforcement. River opened up to Mikayla and his training moved along so smoothly by adding this new training method, he loved to work for Mikayla each training session. She chose to train River with positive reinforcement along side of pressure and release training so River would still know all the traditional cues and could still easily be handled by anyone. Mikayla is a firm believer that being flexible with training methods so each horse or mule will have an individualized education. Specifically Mikayla uses positive reinforcement training in addition to traditional methods in her training program because it can help so many horses grow with their confidence and learn to enjoy being worked during training sessions. The analogy that positive reinforcement training with animals is like paying a person a salary for working a job really stuck in Mikayla’s mind. Adding positive reinforcement to her training program not only helps the horses enjoy their jobs but it helps Mikayla too, when training with only pressure and release she would feel as if she was only seeing things that the horses were wrong instead of just focusing on what they were doing right when incorporating positive reinforcement it caused her to see more things on the positive side.