Planning to try TRT - any advice about getting the most out of it?

S

soloequestrian

Well-Known Member
Joined
14 January 2009
Messages
3,142
Visit site
I'm almost at my wit's end and the TRT marketing machine has sucked me in - my horse is very like all the ones he works with and has the types of issue that he talks about. I've tried various supplements and different ways of working her and she is still permanently one step away from a major spook and never fully focused on me. I have the link for the 7-day trial so will have a go at that before I sign my life away but I wondered if anyone has any advice on how to get the most out of both the trial and the full programme? Thanks
 
Start with the TRT method course
Off the horse course is important as works on your own body language to help the horse understand what you’re asking
Three tries and quit is important
When they give the right answer stop and move on to something else.
They can get confused and start giving the wrong answer
 
See if you can find free content to watch first! I know that everyone else raves about it but I just couldn't for the life of me see the logic behind it.

Also BE CAREFUL if you sign up for instalments. If you pay in full & then don't like it, you can cancel within 90 days & get a full refund. If you pay in instalments, which I did as I was besieged by vet bills at the time, you can only stop future payments and you don't get a refund. So if you can't afford to pay all at once due to funds being tight, you will also not get a refund which you might badly need. And if you cancel, you have to state the exact words that you want to cancel future instalments and that you no longer want 'lifetime access', otherwise you get debt recovery type emails.

Re the 'lifetime access' - while I had it, a ridden spook busting series was released, which I wanted to do, but people with 'lifetime access' still had to pay extra for this additional content...and pay again for future releases of additional content.

I really was puzzled by it. I was very interested in the loading series as I was having loading issues at the time, but it showed a perfectly well behaved horse loading very nicely. It would have been more helpful to show one that was planting, rearing, whatever to start with. Ditto the groundwork spooking - it used a horse that didn't spook. I wanted to see what you are supposed to do when you have a 17hh very giddy youngster spooking all over the place and trampling on you.

I queried this and was told that Tristan is so good at 'reading the horse' that they don't misbehave with him.

I honestly did give it 100% effort, but I simply couldn't join the dots with it. I also watched Q&A sessions where someone asked what to do when their horse is spooking & the answers were always on the lines of, 'you have to teach the horse a different way of using his body...' etc etc which I simply couldn't translate to real life.

Anyway, I am super-aware that it's me who's the outlier! Everyone but me loves it!
 
catembi said:
See if you can find free content to watch first! I know that everyone else raves about it but I just couldn't for the life of me see the logic behind it.

Also BE CAREFUL if you sign up for instalments. If you pay in full & then don't like it, you can cancel within 90 days & get a full refund. If you pay in instalments, which I did as I was besieged by vet bills at the time, you can only stop future payments and you don't get a refund. So if you can't afford to pay all at once due to funds being tight, you will also not get a refund which you might badly need. And if you cancel, you have to state the exact words that you want to cancel future instalments and that you no longer want 'lifetime access', otherwise you get debt recovery type emails.

Re the 'lifetime access' - while I had it, a ridden spook busting series was released, which I wanted to do, but people with 'lifetime access' still had to pay extra for this additional content...and pay again for future releases of additional content.

I really was puzzled by it. I was very interested in the loading series as I was having loading issues at the time, but it showed a perfectly well behaved horse loading very nicely. It would have been more helpful to show one that was planting, rearing, whatever to start with. Ditto the groundwork spooking - it used a horse that didn't spook. I wanted to see what you are supposed to do when you have a 17hh very giddy youngster spooking all over the place and trampling on you.

I queried this and was told that Tristan is so good at 'reading the horse' that they don't misbehave with him.

I honestly did give it 100% effort, but I simply couldn't join the dots with it. I also watched Q&A sessions where someone asked what to do when their horse is spooking & the answers were always on the lines of, 'you have to teach the horse a different way of using his body...' etc etc which I simply couldn't translate to real life.

Anyway, I am super-aware that it's me who's the outlier! Everyone but me loves it!
Click to expand...
I haven't paid for any of these, but my experience of watching Tristan or Warwick Schiller or Lockie Phillips or whoever's free videos (whilst deciding if the subscription is worth it) is that they never seem to be where you are.

My Highland, Fin, is very very reactive (he was feral until he was 8) and hacking alone is still a thing we can't achieve. I'm kind of resigned to that (mostly because my young mare now hacks alone), but when I was trying harder to fix it, I went down a few internet rabbit holes. I saw a thing from Warwick on the 'fifteen foot trail ride,' where the idea is that you always stop and turn the horse around before it gets scared. I wrote on his FB page, "That's well and good, but what do you do if the horse goes from zero to sixty in less than a second, or if you can't just turn around and go the other way?" Unlike Warwick, I am not on my own private 100+ acre ranch, so a lot can go wrong that I have no control over, and going back the way you came isn't always sensible or feaseable. Plus, Fin really really can go from plodding along like a trekking pony to Defcon 5 in like a second. It's an extraordinary ability of his. I'm not deaf to subtle body language. Honestly. He's just incredibly sharp like that.

Anyway, Warwick's response to my comment was basically, "I would never be in a position where I couldn't turn a horse around..." How nice for him. And he said he would always be able read a horse before it got to Defcon 5. Yeah, right. He hasn't met Fin yet! All of us mere mortals end up in sh1t sometimes, and I wanted to know what these Jedi-like trainers do when sh1t meets fan. The answer felt like, "The sh1t never hits the fan, because I am basically the Jedi of horse trainers." Uh, cool. I'm more like the Doctor. I just pretend I know what I'm doing and hoping for the best!
 
I agree that it’s very frustrating that these trainers never show the truly ugly moments, I’ve said it countless times, THAT’s what we need to see, not the perfect horse doing perfect things!

I signed up for the 7day trail last week, my horse has separation anxiety and weaves in his stable so i watched his videos, it took a little while to figure out what he was asking for as he didn’t explain that!! I put it into practice and I have noticed an improvement. He’s not reinventing the wheel and I would be gutted to have spent £200?? For the module, which if i have seen all the videos, is 5 videos of about 20 minutes each!!!
 
I did the 7day free trial and thought it was excellent. I learnt a lot from it although I didn't have a specific problem horse I did it for. I just wanted to learn more about his method
I don't think clicker training will have any relevance at all

It was quite a while ago I did it but from memory there was a lot of info and a lot of videos so for that 7 days to get the most out of it you will need to allocate time each evening to studying it and then the next day putting it into practise so you can go back to the previous day's videos to correct your approach.
For free I thought it gave an amazing amount of info and definitely worth doing even if it eventually doesn't suit you.

As for the full course then I suspect after 7 days you will think it was brilliant and want to carry on or you will have learnt sufficient already. I seem to remember on the full course most of the problems started being solved by going back to the basics learnt in the free trial.
I think there was one problem of I can't lead my horse to the field he takes off on the way and another of I can't get my horse into (or out of can't remember which) the stable without getting trampled on. The problem was solved by back to basics on the free trial.

He is certainly not reinventing the wheel but, from some of the questions on this forum, there seems to be quite a lot of information/methods that people need help with and could benefit from this.

Anyway what can go wrong, it is for free.
 
My old horse was a fencewalker, and I explored a lot of stuff, looking for solutions. Everything. From bonkers, like horse psychics, to stuff like TRT. But it always looked too damn easy and it did pure f*ck all. It seemed like Warwick and Tristan and all these people never had anything as neurotic as she was. Hell, she spent four days at a yard run by a natural horsemanship person who had studied with Mark Rashid and all that, and she told me to leave! Before I moved the mare to aforesaid yard, I explained all of her neurotic stereotypies in great detail, and the trainer/YO assured me, "Oh, we've dealt with some difficult horses here. Trust me. Your horse isn't difficult." Four days later, she was asking me to get the horse off the property because they couldn't deal with her sh1t. That was hilarious (later....much later. Proper Type III fun. it wasn't remotely funny at the time).

The only solution I found was keeping her at yards where she didn't feel the need to do that. No guru ever helped. And I never quite knew what the triggers were (I mean, I knew some, but not all). The yard where she spent the last three years of her life (and where my current horses still are) was one where she never fencewalked. God. knows. why.
 
Last edited:
Caol Ila said:
I haven't paid for any of these, but my experience of watching Tristan or Warwick Schiller or Lockie Phillips or whoever's free videos (whilst deciding if the subscription is worth it) is that they never seem to be where you are.

My Highland, Fin, is very very reactive (he was feral until he was 8) and hacking alone is still a thing we can't achieve. I'm kind of resigned to that (mostly because my young mare now hacks alone), but when I was trying harder to fix it, I went down a few internet rabbit holes. I saw a thing from Warwick on the 'fifteen foot trail ride,' where the idea is that you always stop and turn the horse around before it gets scared. I wrote on his FB page, "That's well and good, but what do you do if the horse goes from zero to sixty in less than a second, or if you can't just turn around and go the other way?" Unlike Warwick, I am not on my own private 100+ acre ranch, so a lot can go wrong that I have no control over, and going back the way you came isn't always sensible or feaseable. Plus, Fin really really can go from plodding along like a trekking pony to Defcon 5 in like a second. It's an extraordinary ability of his. I'm not deaf to subtle body language. Honestly. He's just incredibly sharp like that.

Anyway, Warwick's response to my comment was basically, "I would never be in a position where I couldn't turn a horse around..." How nice for him. And he said he would always be able read a horse before it got to Defcon 5. Yeah, right. He hasn't met Fin yet! All of us mere mortals end up in sh1t sometimes, and I wanted to know what these Jedi-like trainers do when sh1t meets fan. The answer felt like, "The sh1t never hits the fan, because I am basically the Jedi of horse trainers." Uh, cool. I'm more like the Doctor. I just pretend I know what I'm doing and hoping for the best!
Click to expand...
I think most of these trainers are working with domestic horses some of which need training or re training. They will mostly have the same mindset.
I think a feral native until 8 is different and his mindset is too well established for his own safety. He has no choice. Instinct takes over. In a difficult situation his safety is paramount to him. There could be a good case he is simply not fixable in the way a domestic horse is.

I know you will say that BLM mustangs come in and are tamed etc but I wonder if a native pony is very different from their mindset. Possibly on account of being feral native pony rather than a feral mustang horse.
 
I am not sure where you are on the country but I think if you can go to the horsemanship masterclass thing held at Bury Farm you would find it really helpful. Loads of really good trainers and you can talk to people. I went last year and found it interesting and I am not the classic audience.
 
  • Like
Reactions: TPO
paddy555 said:
I think most of these trainers are working with domestic horses some of which need training or re training. They will mostly have the same mindset.
I think a feral native until 8 is different and his mindset is too well established for his own safety. He has no choice. Instinct takes over. In a difficult situation his safety is paramount to him. There could be a good case he is simply not fixable in the way a domestic horse is.

I know you will say that BLM mustangs come in and are tamed etc but I wonder if a native pony is very different from their mindset. Possibly on account of being feral native pony rather than a feral mustang horse.
Click to expand...

I agree; he is not 'fixable' like domestic horse. He works for me because I have Hermosa, so we can adapt to his needs because she can do all the things he can't (travel, hack solo, go out with weird atmospheric pressure drops and not lose her sh1t, etc.). But he's charming and cool, and you can ride him over ground where I'd be far too chickensh1t take Hermosa; he is so smart and clever about footing. I have ridden up some seriously vertical, weird things. He's amazing.

In fairness, I think most of the mustangs who become solid domestic horses are the ones who were caught as 3/4 yr olds and younger. From what I've heard, older ones are as difficult as the Dallas ponies. If Fin had been caught and domesticated as a 3yo, or a yearling, I think he would have been an incredible pony. If he could do what he does without the slightly feral reactivity, he'd be the best pony ever.

Weirdly, he's become quite a good little dressage pony. Hermosa thinks the arena is boring, but Fin has come to see the sandbox as a safe wee space to prance about.
 
Caol Ila said:
I agree; he is not 'fixable' like domestic horse. He works for me because I have Hermosa, so we can adapt to his needs because she can do all the things he can't (travel, hack solo, go out with weird atmospheric pressure drops and not lose her sh1t, etc.). But he's charming and cool, and you can ride him over ground where I'd be far too chickensh1t take Hermosa; he is so smart and clever about footing. I have ridden up some seriously vertical, weird things. He's amazing.

In fairness, I think most of the mustangs who become solid domestic horses are the ones who were caught as 3/4 yr olds and younger. From what I've heard, older ones are as difficult as the Dallas ponies. If Fin had been caught and domesticated as a 3yo, or a yearling, I think he would have been an incredible pony. If he could do what he does without the slightly feral reactivity, he'd be the best pony ever.

Weirdly, he's become quite a good little dressage pony. Hermosa thinks the arena is boring, but Fin has come to see the sandbox as a safe wee space to prance about.
Click to expand...
it's great he has a happy home and is a brilliant and much appreciated little pony. You have done very well for him. :D:D:D:D
 
He's a such a gentle, charming wee guy. Having two horses at this point makes no sense, but I broke down at the thought of selling him. I can't bear the thought of his wee sad face going into a lorry and facing a whole new, scary world without me and my husband looking out for him, and he loves my husband. More than me. And I love riding him. He was meant to be a 'project' while Hermosa grew up. Completely failed at 'project' bit.
 
Thanks, all very helpful. I will sign up for the free trial and take copious notes!
She is such a frustrating horse - the spooking is stopping us getting going. Had a session last week when one of her pals happened to be standing next to the normally spooky corner (the arena is in the field) and that meant the corner was safe so she was lovely to ride. Then earlier this week she would only work in a quarter of the school because there were monsters everywhere else. aarrgghh.
 
My weirdo feral Highland was very, very scared of the school when I first got him.

It took me about two years to get him to the point where we could have basic walk, trot, and something resembling steering in a reliable way. Then we could start focusing on roundness, impulsion, canter, bend, other stuff. I never found any magic tricks or magic methods. I just went in there a few times per week and did whatever he could do, that day. Sometimes, that was walk, trot, canter, shoulder-in, leg-yield, the works. Sometimes, it was walking in circles and avoiding scary corners. If I asked a question he couldn't answer, I'd just leave it. Even if he'd done it the week before. I learned the hard way that pushing him to do the things he was scared of got us nowhere, so I just adapted my plan to whatever he was up for on any given day. If he was finding it hard but tried, I'd take it. Any try, even if it wasn't quite right. Still do. Most of the time now, he schools very sweetly.

This past winter, I put up a video on FB of him cantering, on the wrong lead, and I quipped, "Hey, he's already learned counter-canter!"

One of the yard's instructors commented, "That's not a counter-canter. Counter-canter is yadda, yadda, yadda." I replied, "Dude, I know what counter-canter is. Point is, when I was riding this horse under the floodlights in the school last year, all he would do was freeze and run backwards. The fact that he is cantering at all, on any lead, under the damn floodlights, is bloody amazing." (and I wonder why the instructors don't like me, but that's a different issue).
 
Last edited:
I had the free trial and am a bit mixed feeling over the method too.
I'll try and find time to share my experience of it at some point this weekend as it's nice to hear it from other people's POV!
 
  • Like
Reactions: SEL
Having read quite a lot of excellent reviews, I've been tempted to try it, especially for separation anxiety for one of ours. However, I have been put off by their marketing methods. Mainly, claiming to offer a huge discount (80-odd %) off as a "spring offer" with a counting down clock (which interestingly resets after it 'expires'), then a few weeks later the exact same offer now badged as a "summer offer".

It gives the impression of cash cow rather than genuine desire to help people. I know they are a business not a charity but just gives me a bad taste. So I'm still on the fence with making a decision.
 
Any training needs to be consistent and have a method, so the initial basics in the TRT modules can give you a method, but you have to have the intelligence to adjust the training for your horse and what you want to achieve.

For example all the horses are athletic, it is much harder for a cob to do a lot of the exercises than a warmblood.

I also found he made some things look too easy - things like high stepping etc were never going to happen unless I dedicated huge amounts of time, however I did love the ‘magic way to get on’, which was relatively easy to teach and I believe my horse loved it when she twigged what I wanted.
 
I mentioned this on another thread, but from what I have seen on just his adverts (which I eventually blocked because they were so relentless) TRT uses flooding, which isn't a method I would want to use on any horse. He also very vocally supported CDJ and the corrupt dressage industry as a whole when her abuse video was released. I would be reluctant to give my money to someone like that. I agree with Caol Ila not to get your heart too set on one method fixing your problems - they often promise so much for a lot of money but don't help. If you can find someone in person who could help with the odd lesson, who aligns with your way of thinking and understands your horse well, I would choose in-person help over an online course. There are just too many nuances when it comes to horses.
 
I borrowed my friend's login details to see what I thought. Definitely have a look at the free stuff before parting with cash.

I'm on the fence. There's some stuff which I liked, some stuff which I personally thought was flooding the horse and other stuff I would struggle to bring to my horses in my environment. Its probably telling that I haven't logged back in again.

Maybe it's me but I struggle with trainers who sell a "method" to fix all your problems.

Spooky horses are all different IME. I've got one who will actively look for things to spook at & if you growl at him will get over it. Try that with my big mare and you'd be backwards in the nearest ditch. You can wave umbrellas, tarps and whatever at her though & she won't care. But when she does care she goes straight to meltdown.
 
I think it depends on the horse. For mine she was so blocked in her body that if something spooked her she’d over react to the tension it produced in her body, as soon as she ‘escaped the danger’ she’d release the tension and be calm. 50/50 if I sat that though! TRT has helped by making her body more relaxed and supple so small spooks remain that. The body work helps, if I feel her getting tense I just put my hand in her neck (where she hold tension) and she will exhale the tension. It’s also helped with her nappyness too.
 
If doing a trial for anything, start it on a day when you have 7 days with plenty of time to get the most out of it. Watch as much as you can and try that out. Then sit back and decide if it is for you.

I agree with comments above about trainers in general not showing the bad bits! I vividly remember watching clicker training videos of people getting a headcollar on a horse and it was glaringly obvious that the horse was not feral and had done it before! Left me reinventing the wheel on my own, which is what I was trying to avoid by watching the video in the first place.

I will add though that I also had a well regarded horsemanship trainer out and they were stumped, so I do think a lot of trainers see issues that are actually pretty straightforward for most of their careers.
 
soloequestrian said:
Thanks, all very helpful. I will sign up for the free trial and take copious notes!
She is such a frustrating horse - the spooking is stopping us getting going. Had a session last week when one of her pals happened to be standing next to the normally spooky corner (the arena is in the field) and that meant the corner was safe so she was lovely to ride. Then earlier this week she would only work in a quarter of the school because there were monsters everywhere else. aarrgghh.
Click to expand...
With a horse that is this spooky for no apparent reason I would do a vet loss of performance work up first because the chances are something is going on physically.
 
I don't get the CJD thing or what people regard as aggressive marketing. He is after all running a business and all businesses market their products.

For 7 days for free you are able to watch a method which, certainly when I watched it, went into a lot a detail.
As with any method you can take what you want from it, all of it, just bits or decide it won't work for your horse. You can even just watch it and pick holes in it. :D For free.

Not all horses or ponies will be able to do all of it but then not all riders will want them to and not all riders will be able to ride or school to that standard anyway

When I watched it it was not about showing the bad bits it was a method, the method started with the horse standing a couple of yards behind you in it's own space relaxed and calm, then you walked off and it remained a distance behind at a walk. That is what you teach the horse. For some it will come easily and for some it will take a while and a lot of perseverance. TRT videos does work on understanding his method and then working to adapt it for your horse.

For problems such a separation, stabling, fencewalking etc I don't think this or any other method is very relevant. The horse has a stress problem with living. That needs solving by finding what is upsetting it and changing it. For example I bought a 4yo who had never been stabled and who had no intention of ever being stabled. He stressed, weaved, barged out of the door etc The only way to resolve his problem was to change his intended living arrangements. That took my imagination and what I did wasn't a method and wouldn't work for all horses so I don't see how TRT, WS or any other trainer can show a method for it.

Pinkvboots said:
With a horse that is this spooky for no apparent reason I would do a vet loss of performance work up first because the chances are something is going on physically.
Click to expand...
I seem to remember another post about this from OP.

I tried to apply TRT to a horse that was having spooking problems and failed. I took advice from Karl Greenwood which if I had followed it I would have ended up very hurt. He didn't even suggest the problem and in all honesty I doubt any other online training method would have been any different.
I removed the offending eye (ERU) the spooking improved. So I agree with you PB, the reason may not be training and if that is the case then neither TRT nor any other method is going to help.
 
I do take on board what people have said about spooking being associated with a medical condition but as I've said above, the day her friend was standing just outside the spooky corner she worked into it, and the whole of the rest of the school, perfectly. If my instructor stands in that corner it ceases to be a problem. I think the horse is genuinely anxious, so I suppose a health problem in terms of her mental rather than physical health. I need to find a way to reduce her anxiety.
 
paddy555 said:
I don't get the CJD thing or what people regard as aggressive marketing. He is after all running a business and all businesses market their products.
Click to expand...

I personally just hate any hyper-commercialisation of horse training. TRT's marketing is certainly very aggressive, to the point that it almost implies horses are machines which can easily be 're-programmed' if you take the course/buy the video/whatever. There's something about having adverts of that kind shoved in your face which feels really distasteful to me. I understand that they are running a business, but it makes me uncomfortable in the same way that Parelli does. Not just the techniques used, but how they market it to try and amass a cult following. I'm struggling to eloquently describe why, but the adverts 'give me the ick'.
 
How did the trial go?

I just saw yet another TRT ad - made me laugh, it advocated that you had to get horses used to sounds and sights of the outside world at home and teach them specifically in the TRT way or they’d be spooky. We take our youngsters out with an older friend until they know what they are doing. Nothing as good as being taught by a member of your own species! Some of mine have been wild on the NF or Dartmoor before they came here - they already knew about cars and the outside world! I think the marketing pitch is perhaps a little over the top…
 
I have the lifetime access and I wish I hadn’t wasted the money now especially as soon as you sign up you are invited to pay extra for various additional products and then more for things like the clinics and demos. I do like the way the course and lessons are split into small chunks and broken down. However it simply didn’t seem to work for my horse and I trawled through every video to find a similar case but couldn’t find anything. One of his major issues is pulling away which means that a lot of the groundwork content was unmanageable. Also keeping him out of my space was a big issue. Without an instructor giving real-time feedback I didn’t know if I was just doing it wrong.

I’ve recently done a 3-day course with a local trainer Tracey Duncan and the difference and progress has been amazing. I’m sure that it won’t be smooth sailing but my ability to engage him with me has absolutely changed. We actually started with liberty work where he didn’t have anything to pull against then progressed back to work on a rope. I had the confidence to walk him out for the first time for months this weekend.

I’m learning to read the horse I have and adapt my training rather than applying the same method regardless. He is super smart, high energy and playful and keeping him challenged and interested is key. We also did a lot of work on teaching him to relax by watching for signs e.g. yawning and praising them.

Having never done any liberty work I’m really enjoying it especially as he’s so responsive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top