Has natural horsemanship actually changed how horses are trained across disciplines?

Natural horsemanship has genuinely changed how horses are trained across multiple disciplines, though the depth and consistency of that change varies considerably between disciplines and between individual practitioners. The most pervasive change is the normalization of groundwork as a foundation for training across virtually all disciplines — the expectation that horses should understand yield-to-pressure, basic lateral movements, and desensitization before training demands become more complex was not universally held before natural horsemanship made it mainstream, and it is now considered basic informed training practice across western disciplines, English disciplines, and even some performance horse contexts that had not historically emphasized groundwork. The emphasis on reading the horse's emotional state during training — working below the flight threshold, recognizing shutdown versus genuine calm, understanding what the horse's behavior is communicating — has influenced equine veterinary practice, behavior consulting, and rehabilitation work across disciplines in ways that are now incorporated into mainstream practice without necessarily being identified as natural horsemanship. The sport horse world — dressage, jumping, eventing — has been more resistant to the specific clinic culture and western horsemanship aesthetics of natural horsemanship while independently arriving at some of the same principles through the influence of researchers like Andrew McLean whose learning-theory-based approaches validated natural horsemanship's pressure-and-release foundations through scientific study. The western performance disciplines have been most directly changed, with the natural horsemanship emphasis on softness and genuine lightness influencing how reining, cutting, and ranch horse trainers talk about and develop their horses even when they do not explicitly identify with the natural horsemanship movement.