I have been watching a video series with Richard Caldwell, an incredible horseman. The main theme from Richard is to be “consistent” in everything you do with your horse. Interestingly a barn-mate recently posted a quote from Ray Hunt that goes something like “you get out of your horse exactly what you put in, in exactly the way you put it in“.
We all get lazy, and after we have got something working pretty good we tend to relax on that and move on to focus on something else, but when we go back into the horse, looking for what we put in we find it isn’t what we thought we had put in, in comes out similarly but not the way we wanted. If we scratch around in there for a while and revisit our previous training we can usually find it.
The point though is that if we layer lax and lazy work on top of the cleaner and clear stuff we had done, that is usually what we find first – but if we had been more consistent with what we had put in there would be no doubt what we might find.