In my top 3 contexts for training with CLA, this small hill might be first. While me 20 years ago was building my perfect “dream” arena with flat, even footing… my horses were losing vital movement and adaptable agility. Here, my golden senior boy brings it💪🏼

The difference between farm equipment made outside the U.S. and equipment made here is typically tens of thousands of dollars. Two senior citizen farmers — yeah, we don’t have the luxury of “just buy American,” and this tiny-farm gear is not worth it for U.S. companies to build.

Whatever one’s tariff views, the worst response for me is, “Just buy American!” I own a tiny farm. The only baling machines I could ever afford are a size not made in U.S.: the mini-balers made in India and China, sold to U.S. distributors. Soon, they’ll be impossible to get here

That said, I 100% use the label “badass”, but for me a “badass” has high skills (and earned self-efficacy), NOT to be confused with “bully.”

When I hear the phrase “alpha male”, the software dev in me thinks of “alpha” as the version that’s (charitably) half-assed, unstable, buggy, missing key features, unsafe, not for public release. i.e. not a flex. And as animal trainer, I think, “alpha wolf was debunked ages ago.”

“I want my athletes to put their unique stamp on the sport.” — @michaelzweifel on the @JustFlySports podcast episode that seriously inspired me! We expect elite athletes to have a “signature” move yet typically train for all to move the same 🤷🏼‍♀️

Not complaining really, but if you’re selling a home, please be kind and document the hell out of *all those quirky and counter-intuitive things*. I can find appliance manuals online, but how the garden electricity was wired up? 😳

Buy a tiny item for $12 on Amazon and it comes with a manual. But the most expensive thing you’ll ever buy — in my case, a house — no manual. When pipes froze unexpectedly, we called previous owner who said, “oh, if there was a north wind we stacked hay bales outside that wall”

Fiction vs Reality in skill acquisition, number 343. I was taught our value as trainers was directly proportional to our explicit “correcting” when I was just creating fragile (extremely context-dependent) skills.

He’s “developed” a wide range of movements so far beyond what I had ever thought possible, from a combo of EcoD (context design to afford, etc. ) and learning from the other mature horses.

An experiment I started 3+ years ago to take an untrained, near-feral young horse to explore the “minimum viable teaching” I could get away with. So far, I’ve still “taught” him just one thing: “it’s fun to track and/or catch objects a human holds/throws…

Human babies: we’re excited they hit a milestone of “discovering” they have a foot and can wiggle it 🥹. Baby horses: they figure it out 60 minutes after birth; by day 2, “oh hell yes I can double-barrel kick stuff with these hind legs!” Incredible stability/balance challenge.

Every coach/trainer of humans that insists that movement skill uses “stored motor programs” should spend time with newborn precocious animals. A newborn horse is executing advanced, agile movements like a mofo in the first week of life, sometimes the first DAY. #ecod

What’s remarkable about last night with Baby Nimo is not the quality of the (effortful) movement, but that he was never trained to do this. Or *reinforced* for the position/posture. He’s only ever reinforced for “playing the game”, and movement emerges as he challenges himself.

AI added this on my Instagram reel and it’s a statement that’s both statistically unlikely and beautiful ❤️🤸‍♂️. Because yes, actually. That’s literally the Whole Damn Thing. What happens when you are 100% all-in on training with ZERO technique, biomechanics, body-parts instruction

Bottom line: while human trainers/coaches/therapists have been on a decades-long path viewing humans (and horses) as complicated robots, Open-Ended AI takes inspiration from the adaptability of animals. True agility in an emergent. “Optimal” biomechanics was a myth.

I recommend it for anyone involved with movement skill acquisition, from rehab to elite performance. I’m seeing coaches, chiropractors, physios of both humans and horses now discovering it. We have an entire horse group named #steppingstones based on principles from the book/work

The most important book on horse training has nothing to do with horses. It’s “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” by AI researchers @kenneth0stanley and @joellehmann . It would have been easier to only dog-ear the pages I did not need to revisit 😁💁‍♀️

“If you want to mess with your tennis opponent [in real-time], compliment a specific technique and ask them how they are doing it…” - Tim Gallwey, “Inner Game of Tennis” 😁devious use of “reinvestment theory”, works best on those who learned explicitly “correct mechanics”

Agile beats fragile. My “old guy” (age 25) responds to a *movement* purpose, not a “what movement does the trainer want?” External focus: I’m holding the foam block he knows I will throw for him to “catch” (move to and put his hoof on it)