Supporting Intrinsic Learning

Why We Don’t Use Treats During Equine Hanna Somatics Sessions

One question that comes up often around Equine Hanna Somatics is why we don’t use treats during a session. This isn’t a judgment about food-based training or reinforcement in general. It’s a choice that’s specific to what we’re asking the nervous system to do in this work.

There are two main reasons.

First, treats shift which parts of the brain are being activated.

Equine Hanna Somatics works primarily with the voluntary motor cortex and the somatic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system responsible for conscious control of movement, coordination, and the ability to sense what muscles are doing in real time.

When food is introduced, the horse’s attention often shifts outward. Treats commonly activate the seeking system within the limbic brain. This is the emotional system associated with anticipation, searching, and food motivation. At that point, the horse is no longer primarily tracking internal body sensations. Instead, they’re operating through external reward and expectation.

EHS is designed to be self-rewarding. When the horse begins to recognize that the movements feel good, that their body feels more organized and more comfortable, they become intrinsically motivated to participate. That intrinsic motivation only emerges when the voluntary motor cortex is engaged and the nervous system is allowed to reset resting muscle tone from the inside out.

The second reason is about movement quality and protecting the nervous system’s learning process.

For the benefits of EHS to occur, the horse needs to initiate a very specific type of movement: a controlled concentric contraction of a muscle, followed by a very slow, intentional eccentric contraction of the same muscle. This allows the brain to sense whether the muscle is shortening or lengthening and to recalibrate resting muscle tone accordingly.

When treats are involved, horses often reach beyond their comfortable range of motion to follow or grab the food. That reaching frequently turns into passive stretching of muscle fibers and in somatic work, we want to avoid stretching.

Stretching can activate the stretch reflex, a protective reflex whose job is to maintain a muscle’s current length by contracting it back toward its pre-stretch state. In many cases, the reflex doesn’t just return the muscle to its previous length, it can actually cause the muscle to contract even more strongly afterward.

That response is counterproductive in somatic movement. The goal of EHS isn’t to add layers of contraction or tension, but to return resting muscle tone toward neutral. This is also why EHS can be less effective or less long-lasting if movements are done too quickly or pushed too far, accidentally triggering the stretch reflex.

At its core, Equine Hanna Somatics is about helping the horse reconnect with their own body through awareness, not performance or compliance. By removing food from the equation during sessions, we give the nervous system the quiet it needs to learn, reorganize, and remember what ease actually feels like.